


ad infinitum

by hyperphonic



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, honest it was, i write about the TIE Silencer so much it almost deserves its own tag, it was only a matter of time until i started a vignette collection, lots of allusions to reverse anidala, lots of smut, varykino crops up a ton
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-03-22 22:05:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 46
Words: 36,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13773525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyperphonic/pseuds/hyperphonic
Summary: adverbagain and again in the same way; forever. (vignette collection/ratings may vary)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: all i own is one (1) sick ass "casual sex friday" coffee mug

Rey of Jakku’s voice is Ben’s favorite sound. He loves it more than the scream of his TIE-Silencer or the soft _clink_ of sabacc dice in a quiet cockpit. He loved it even on Starkiller base, spitting barbs at him from across the steady hum of his grandfather’s lightsaber. Somewhere along the line, between the collapse of Starkiller and his ascension to Supreme Leader, the sound of her voice has become something like a hymn. When the Force connects them late into the light cycle, he closes his eyes against the cold light of his bunk upon the _Finalizer_ and falls asleep listening to the soft lilt of her reading archaic Jedi texts.

When he inevitably wakes (screaming) from nightmares of catwalks and too soft eyes, she is there, pinning him back against his mattress to calm his thrashing. _Ben_ she breathes, voice rattling around inside his head, and the Supreme Leader clings to her voice in the dark of his room, even as shaking hands come up to clutch her ribs. Rey bites her lip, bumps her nose against his jaw, and settles in for the rest of the night. 

Her voice rings through his mind over the course of each day, murmuring quick updates on her training ( _I taught myself a new staff form today_ ), or narrating X-Wing repairs from lonely hangars. He loves her, knows it like he knows the inflection her voice when she says his name, keeps the fact tucked away in the hollow between his collarbones. Slowly, his nightmares happen with less and less frequency, and more mornings start with him waking up to Rey’s soft breath against his throat. 

Their love blossoms steadily, takes up more and more space in his chest until their bond never quite closes and every morning starts with Rey in his arms. The morning that the war ends dawns clear and cold, with the watery sunlight typical of boreal planets. Rey has her head tucked under his chin, lips parted sweetly against his Adam’s apple, and Ben hopes that he gets to start every day for the rest of his life like this. When she wakes her voice is low, rough with sleep and still the sweetest sound he’s ever heard. 

“I love you.”

“I love you too” he presses into her hair, the first words out of his mouth. It seems fitting, to him, that those are the words that ring in this new era for them. 

When their son comes bursting into the world wet, dark haired, and screaming, Rey looks to him from the medical bed and her voice has _never_ been sweeter than when she whispers his name.

“ _Ben._ ” He’s beside her on the barely big enough medical bed before the droids can even begin to protest.

They name their son Anakin, and true to his namesake, he develops opinions almost instantly. Opinions that, apparently, can only be voiced at about 3 in the morning, Galactic Standard. The first time it happens, Rey is out of his arms in an instant, their bond alight with _I am here I am here, don’t worry I’m coming for you_ (Ben feels his heart break, and not for the first time wishes he could blow Jakku into an asteroid field). She returns with the wailing infant and settles back into his arms, eyes fluttering closed for just a second when he presses a kiss behind her ear.

Anakin continues to wail in his mother’s arms, completely indifferent to his parents and their attempts to cocoon him in the Force, and in a final attempt at calming him down, Rey begins to sing. There aren’t words, just a soft little tune, one Ben can easily imagine a much smaller Rey humming to herself as she picks through the skeletal remains of Star Destroyers. Like clockwork, the two males calm down, clinging closer to the woman between them; Anakin sniffing softly as his tears cease, Ben sniffing softly as his eyes well up.

She is whole and warm in his arms, the bond between them open and full of love. He could hardly believe she was real, this woman who brought him home, stood toe to toe with a hero she idolized on his account, who trusted him (loved him) enough to bring a child into this world with him. Rey quiets in his arms, tune fading into the quiet edges of their bedroom, and presses a kiss against his bicep where her head rests.

“I love you,” he whispers into the three am quiet, lips in her hair.

“I love you too,” Rey replies, already half asleep; Ben savors each syllable, the sweetest sounds he’s ever heard.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the tumblr prompt: Reylo swimming
> 
> (there's almost no swimming)

He teaches her how to swim in the shallow, warm waters of Naboo’s Lake Country. The air is warm, laced with the scent of flowers at the peak of their bloom, a far cry from the blend of rocket fuel and lightsaber cauterized wounds that they’re both so accustomed to. Rey’s hair floats in the water around her head like a corona, lapping against the flat planes of Ben’s chest where he causes ripples in the otherwise calm surface. She’s on her back with her shoulder blades cupped loosely in Ben’s reverent hands, brow ever so slightly creased as she attempts to float.

 

They’re both stripped down to nothing but the barest necessities, breast bindings (Rey), and loosely fitted flight pants (Ben) left on in more a show of control than anything else. Varykino’s staff know better than to linger when its present owner sweeps in; scavenger girl in hand and cloak snapping at his heels. They’re alone in the estate, a fact that sits heavy and warm in the bottom of Ben’s stomach. He doesn’t know how long they’ll be able to stay, cloistered together among the dense foliage and quiet kind of warm that comes with sharing a bed, but in this moment he doesn’t quite care.

 

Rey sighs beneath him, reaches one hand up and out of the lake to brush wet fingers against the sharp line of his jaw. His heart nearly stops, and it’s all Ben can do to sink to his knees in the water and press his lips against her forehead. The sun filters down to fall against the slowly tanning skin of his bare shoulders, and Rey twists in his arms to face him properly.

 

“I did it that time,” she grins, radiant with wet hair slicked down her neck and back. Ben tugs her closer, edges his fingers under the soaked fabric at her back, and presses a kiss to the bridge of her nose.

 

“You did,” small hands cup his face, warm and wet and smelling of life, “I’m proud.”

 

Rey of Jakku kisses him in the fragrant water of his ancestral home, the Force so bright between them it’s nearly blinding. Her lips are warm, soft in a way he’ll never tire of when they open beneath his tongue, pliant only for him. Ben breaks the kiss to focus his attentions on the long line of her throat, laving kisses and gentle declarations of love against the skin there to great effect. Breath caught firmly in her throat, Rey melts against him, pushes her nose into his hair and her lips against his temple.

 

“Ben,” she speaks innocently enough, light tone completely belied by the way their bond drips with intent. He pulls her tight against his hips, and is rewarded with the bite of her nails against his back as she continues. “Let’s go inside.”

 

Unsettled water laps against the shore as he stands, one arm wrapped tight around Rey to hold her tight to his chest. She laughs, the sound brilliant and bright in the summer sun, and Ben cannot get them back into the airy marble halls of Varykino fast enough.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Ben and Rey sitting in a tree K I S S I N G .... but literally. Making out in a tree.

The forests that pool at the base of the mountains in Corellia’s northern region are like nothing Rey has ever seen before. They’re a far cry from Jakku and its gently sloping dunes, closer by far to the thick forests of Takodana. Rey loves them, loves the way branches snap underneath her boots, and how she can tell just by the way the air smells that the planet is _alive_. Ben shows her how to navigate using the growth patterns of moss, and to tell what water is suitable for drinking without purification (the answer, Rey realizes: is not a lot of it).

 

He loves his father’s homeworld, that much is evident in the way the dark man rises with the sun each morning; how he lets his Force signature delve into the soil beneath them when they ascend into the soaring peaks that litter the planet. It is the most Rey has even seen him commune with a planet, and it sends her poor heart frantically stuttering against the cage of her ribs.

 

They train in the same clearing each day, packing the forest floor down until it’s as smooth as any naturally occurring surface could be. The old, old trees around them whisper and rustle in the wind, adding their voices to the hum of lightsabers. It’s after one such training session that Rey throws her lightstaff over her back, and experimentally pulls herself up into the boughs of one ancient conifer. The bark is scaly, warm against her hands with the sun, and lightyears different from the cool, indifferent Star Destroyers she’s accustomed to scaling.

 

Ben smiles up at her from the ground below, eyes liquid with some emotion she can’t quite pin, and Rey casts a cheeky grin over one shoulder before beginning to climb. She’s about halfway up the tree, marveling at the thickness of each branch as she sets her weight against them, when Ben follows. He’s slower, not quite as good at this as her, but he’s also stronger, and makes up the difference in almost no time.

 

“Hard to tell you weren’t born in a tree,” he comments when they stand on the same bough, boots slotted together like two halves of a coupler. Rey laughs, leans back against the trunk, and blushes when their bond rings, _beautiful_. There’s a beat, one second where Ben’s eyes are heavy on the sweep of her collarbone, and the sweat that gleams on her bare shoulders before he closes the distance between them to kiss her.

 

Rey sighs, and thinks that the trees echo her sentiment as a soft breeze sifts through the upper part of the canopy around them. His lips are soft, gentle when she opens beneath them, and the thought that he is _hers_ makes Rey dizzy in a way that no height ever could (Ben smiles when that thought filters across the bond, and presses closer still). He has one hand braced against the trunk behind her and the other curled around her hip, thumb rubbing lazy circles into the soft skin behind her hipbone as they break apart.

 

“This is probably dangerous,” she jokes, voice going breathy at the end when his lips find the underside of her jaw. Ben dips his head to rain kisses across her throat, and Rey feels rather sees the smirk when he responds.

 

“Probably.”

But it’s hard to care when he nudges the loose fabric of her training shirt off of one shoulder, takes his time pressing his lips to the freckled skin as her fingers come up to card through his hair. Ben hums, brings his head back up to kiss her again, and melts into her when she whispers his name. The canopy continues to shift around them, fluid with wind and the surge of the Force as Ben slips his hand beneath her shirt. Rey thinks that maybe, just _maybe_ , this is all she wants: sun that doesn’t kill, a planet that sings with life on every level, and Ben, whole and happy against her skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spring break is here and all i want to do is write about space idiots in love- help a sister out and send a prompt or my way? either via my tumblr ( _hyperphonic_ ), or in the comments below~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Ben gets Rey pregnant and feels kinda bad about it, even though it's a happy event and Rey is very excited? Ben is just like "Oh my god, i thought we said no more Skywalkers"

Rey tells him she is pregnant with no pretense or preamble one morning from the headboard of his bed; simply announces it with all the weight of a comment on the thread count of his sheets. Her words hang in the recycled air between them, bouncing off of the cool durasteel paneling like blaster shots, and Ben freezes as if she’d reached out through the force to immobilize him. Her excitement is palpable through their bond: warm, bright, and echoed as if this isn’t the first time the Force has felt this way.

 

“Ben?” She’s painfully beautiful where she sits, hips swathed in his sheets and eyes shining with what starlight filters in through the windows. He puffs his upper lip out, runs a hand through wild hair and tries desperately to control the anxiety that claws through his chest (to no avail). It must leak across the bond, because in the next second Rey is scrambling across black sheets, heedless of her state of undress to pull him back onto the mattress beside her. Her hands are warm, rough with callouses from her staff when they curl around his biceps to tug him into her lap.

 

 “Ben,” she presses into his hair, “talk to me.” He swallows thickly and adjusts their position so he can tuck his nose into the crook of her neck, unable to articulate the feeling in his chest. Instead he pushes images of his grandparents across the bond: the soft sunlight of Naboo slanting over dark robes and fair skin, Padmé’s death certificate stark on the screen of a datapad. Rey pulls him closer, presses a kiss against the crown of his head, and lets him continue. Next is the smell of rocket fuel when his parent’s left him with Luke, inadequacy and sorrow surging in his small chest like the tides of some great ocean. He exhales shakily, presses a kiss against her pulse,  _I didn’t want to continue the Skywalker line._

 

“It’ll be different this time,” she whispers into his hair, conviction clear in the stroke of her fingers down his spine (Ben believes her).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you all know the drill, my inbox is ready and waiting for prompts~


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Rey has no manners whatsoever. she means well but literally tries to sit ON the table during meals. Maybe her and Ben go over some etiquette?.
> 
> i swear to got i tried my hardest, it just... wanted to do this??????

Ben realizes, with all the sharpness of a knife driven into the space between his first and second ribs, that he cannot conceptualize the severity of life on Jakku. He simply has no comparable experience to hold it to, and the knowledge sits heavy in the pit of his stomach when he dwells on it too long. Jakku is apparent in every aspect of Rey: from the sharp jut of her hipbones against his lips, to the way she perches on the mess hall benches, hands clasped tight on the edges of her plate. It’s humbling to recognize that, even at his darkest hour, he still had access to consistent food and water.

 

He has never felt deprivation like the girl who lays beside him. Not just in terms of sustenance, Ben concludes one evening as Rey sprawls on the bed beside him, all long limbs and soft breath. She is gorgeous, quite possibly the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and without thinking, the last Skywalker stretches one hand out to caress the gentle swell of her ribcage. Rey stiffens instantly, freezing under his palm like a cornered tauntaun, and Ben quickly moves to give her space.

 

“Wait,” she exhales shakily, turns her head to peer at him over a freckled shoulder, “wait, try again.” Ben does as he is told, and runs one thumb lightly over the length of her fourth rib, leaving gooseflesh in his wake. Rey lets her eyes flutter shut, and leans into the touch, their bond lighting up with the anxious flutter of her heart.

 

After that, Ben starts to touch more and more. A brush of his hand against the small of her back as they exit his quarters, a caress against her cheek on his way to tuck stray hair back behind her ear after a particularly rough sparring session; with each tough she relaxes into him more and more until one night, head cushioned against his pillows she asks:

 

“Touch me?” Ben rolls onto one elbow to hover over her, eyes heavy as he studies her face.

 

“Howso?” His fingers dart forward to brush the hair out of her face even as he poses the question. Rey turns her head to press a kiss to his palm, and suddenly Ben understands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always, send your prompts to my tumblr, _hyperphonic_.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: two words: GALACTIC ROAD-TRIP??? maybe finn and rose can come too? somehow? could be a modern AU too
> 
> I put this in the copacetic universe because i kinda put you guys through the ringer last update and i feEL BAD, OKAY?

“Ben you don’t just get to dominate the aux cord, there are three other people in the car too.”

 

First Order’s lead guitarist huffs, and throws a glance at Rey that dangerously toes the line between indignant and pouting. Eyes on the road, Rey just offers a grin in return, and takes her hand off the gearshift long enough to accept the cord from her sulking boyfriend. She’s got Ben, Rose, and Finn (along with Ben’s strat, lovingly strapped into the middle seat) all piled into her tiny car to make the pilgrimage down to Portland. It’s the peak of summer, and the asphalt stretched out ahead of them shimmers with heat and sun reflected off the back of the First Order van.

 

Leaning forward enough to bump Rey’s seat, Rose snatches the cord and plugs it into her phone (and though Rey can’t see her, she knows the other girl’s face is split in a catlike grin).

 

“We can’t all listen to hardcore 24/7, Solo.” She teases, and Rey doesn’t bother to stop her laughter that bubbles up at the quip.  Beside her, Ben rolls his eyes, and slouches against the dark upholstery to lean his head on Rey’s shoulder.

 

“Suit yourself, Tico.” The girl in question just giggles, and presses a kiss to Finn’s cheek as they conspiratorially huddle over the guitar between them to scroll through her music library.

 

“You’re about to get to play all the sad boy music you want anyways,” Rose fires back, and it’s not untrue; they’re tearing down the highway to record First Order’s first album, an admittedly angst-ridden project born of the last winter’s events.  

 

Poe picks up the pace ahead of them, miles between their little caravan and the destination rapidly dwindling, and Rey follows suit. Anticipation building under the bright summer sun, Ben sits up enough to dust his lips across one freckled shoulder (Rey thinks that maybe everything she’ll ever need is in her car right now).  


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Rey gives Kylo a boner at a REALLY inopportune moment. He wants to fuck her so bad but can’t at the moment.... bonus if he gets her later tho ;)
> 
> i didn't get to the bonus, maybe it'll just have to get a chapter of it's own ;)

Ben takes after his mother’s side of the family: he has Anakin’s hair, Padme’s eyes, and the same soft smile as Leia. He does not, however, have his mother’s natural inclination to lead, nor her patience for politics. In this arena, where lightsabers and quick thinking can’t help him, he feels decidedly like his father’s son (and wishes, not for the first time, to just slip into the comfortable quiet of his TIE Silencer and leave). In the months since Crait, Ben’s life has become a dreary montage of meetings, each one seeming to plod on longer than the next, monotony interrupted by the occasional snap of the Force.

“Oh,” she says the first time it happens, pretty lips parted in surprise, “I wasn’t sure if it would happen again.” Ben swallows, tears his eyes away from where her tongue darts out, and wishes maybe that it hadn’t.

His head has never been silent, but for the first time in his life, Ben doesn’t mind the voice that echoes off of cranial bones. Rey’s voice becomes a source of comfort, and before he knows it they’re sitting opposite one another again, only this time his fingers close the distance to cradle her cheek, and there are no ghosts from his past to stop them when she sighs into the touch. The kiss that follows tastes like Corellian sun and salt water, Ben never wants it to end.

Four months after the Battle of Crait, Ben wakes up with Rey in his bed. She’s on her side, breath fanning out across his shoulder from where she’s pillowed her head against his chest, and the Supreme Leader has no kriffing clue what to do. He can’t move, that would surely wake her, but he also can’t stay because his heart is starting to pound low in his throat and she’s so kriffing gorgeous with her lips parted against his skin he doesn’t know what to do and- hazel eyes snap open with all the force of a lightsaber igniting, and the choice is promptly ripped from Ben’s hands. They end up fucking that morning, slow and soft on the black of Ben’s mussed sheets.

It’s a memory he spends a lot of time dwelling on, finds his mind drawn to the way Rey’s lips had wrapped around his cock, how she’d whispered his name into the skin of his throat when she came. Thinks on it especially at times like now, back straight against his chair as he sits at the head of the negotiations table and listens (halfheartedly) to Hux drone. 

Which is all well and good until, as if hearing his thoughts, the Force draws tight with a snap, and suddenly Rey is standing at the other end of the table, side to him as she washes her hair. What little attention he’d been paying Hux flows down the drain with the water that slides over her body. She’s perfect, turned quarter so he can see one pert nipple and count her ribs when she leans back to rinse her hair. He lets out a hot breath, throat constricting with want, and Rey slides him a glance over one freckled shoulder. 

She’s wickedly intelligent, and he’s sure she has an idea as to what he’s doing; especially so when she bends over, one foot beveled as she reaches for something on the floor of her ‘fresher (Ben doesn’t know, or care what). He wants to dismiss the meeting, send Hux and his parade of idiots skittering out the door so he can close his lips over the nipple still visible when she raises back up to full height. He broadcasts as much over the bond, and doesn’t bother to hide his pleasure when her cheeks dust pink. 

Ben doesn’t need to peek underneath the lip of the table to know that he’s hard, painfully so when Rey’s eyes land on what he’s sure is an obvious tent in his pants. She bites her lips, lathers her hands up to trace teasing circles over her breasts and Ben thinks he’s going to break his jaw with how hard he’s clenching it. Rey’s hands inch down her stomach, fingertips just kissing the skin between her hipbones, and it’s clear across the bond what she’s going to do. Heart pounding against his ribs harder than any battering ram cannon, Ben leans forward, steeples his fingers, and tries not to let out a snarl when Rey’s first finger dips between her legs.

“Supreme Leader.” Hux’s voice lashes like a whip, and suddenly Rey is gone. “Have you listened to a word I’ve said?” His general chides, before falling silent at the edge of Ben’s stare.

“Clearly so,” Ben grinds out, fingertips going white where he presses them against one another, “unless you’re looking for an invitation to repeat yourself.”

He should have ended the meeting when he had a chance.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhh, no one asked for this but here i am anyways.

Ben Solo doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything as erotic as the sight of Rey’s tiny hands curled around the hilt of his lightsaber. From the second she’d snatched it off of his belt in the throne room the image has haunted him, her eyes burning from behind his blade every time he closes his eyes. Even after Crait, when their Force bond festered in the back of his mind like an open wound, he couldn’t help himself. She’d spurned him, turned down his outstretched hand in favor of his Mother and her ill-prepared band of Rebels, and yet he still wanted her (still felt like his heart beat for her, lonely in the dark of his quarters).

 

It’s that image: lean arms flexing as she deftly spun the hilt of his saber in her hands, ready to face down the voice that had whispered into his ear for each one of his twenty-nine years, that keeps Ben up at night. It’s what he dwells on when council meetings drag on, Hux’s voice droning over military aptitudes and upgrades to be made to their fleet. The ossified fools that sit before him angle for recognition, spin their wheels uselessly, and Ben imagines how it would feel to have her hands wrapped around his cock instead of his saber.

 

Being Supreme Leader does not suit him, his talents lie behind the controls of his TIE Silencer, or out on the battlefield; not behind the lacquered top of the negotiations table. But there’s no way he can strong arm the First Order into filling his needs if he isn’t in the throne, and Ben’s not fool enough to pass the opportunity up. There is no future for him but one where Rey stands beside him, lips at his throat and hands beneath his robes, and this is the only way to ensure that.  

 

He knows she can feel him through the bond, watches how the corners of her eyes soften a little bit more each time the Force connects them. She feels it too ( _of course she does_ ), wants it just as badly as he does, and the knowledge only fuels him further. He’s unashamed when he steps into his quarters, shedding oppressive layers of dark fabric with each step he takes closer to the ‘fresher, well aware of her eyes on his back.

 

“Just going to watch?” He purrs from beneath the nearly scalding water, throat going dry when her gaze meets his own, hunger visible in every line of her small body. Rey bites her lip, clenches and unclenches tiny fists at her sides, and breaks their staring contest to follow the rivulets of water that slide down his body. It’s answer enough for him, and Ben revels in the surge of lust from her end of the bond when he wraps one hand around his shaft.

 

He begins to pump slowly, one arm braced against the cool durasteel wall, eyes on Rey the whole time. She’s panting, footfalls sure as she closes the distance between them steadily. He stops her dead in her tracks when he opens up the bond fully, pushes his thoughts into her mind with as much grace as he can muster. There’s her, snarling up at Snoke with his lightsaber in her hands, eyes lit up with its unsteady snap. Her, sprawled in the throne they’d claimed together with his saber held limply on one hand, head tilted back as he kneels to bury his tongue in her cunt. His hands white knuckled on the arms of his chair as she blows him, crouched beneath the lip of the negotiations table, none of the filthy men around them any the wiser.

 

Her pretty lips part, pupils blown wide while his pace increases, nearly punishing as he watches her memorize the sight of him. Ben comes with her eyes on his fist, greedy in the half light of his ‘fresher. Rey licks her lips, flicks her stare back up to his heavy eyes, and looks for all the world like she’s about to devour him when the Force goes taught and snaps the bond closed.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Rey and Kylo getting it on and someone catches them or they are using loud dirty talk and someone (s) hear them. Bonus if it’s in canon.
> 
> and ya bitch even went for the bonus this time ;)

Since defecting to the Resistance three standard months ago, Ben Solo has spent exactly five nights in his assigned bunk. The rest of them have been spent tangled in Rey’s sheets, sweat slicked and exploring the limits of both their bond and bodies. Ben’s a generous lover, giving and giving and _giving_ until Rey trembles underneath his hands on the rickety bunk (she loves every second of it).

 

Life carries on as it always has on the Resistance fleet; Leia guides them through the stars, whip smart and more daring than ever with her son back at her side, Finn and Rose shine with something incandescent and good, and Poe and Ben bicker constantly. Not a single day passes where their bond doesn’t flare to life at least once with Ben’s irritation, ignited usually by snide comments regarding piloting expertise, or sometimes (on days when tensions run high and the First Order seems too impenetrable a foe) hissed jabs about the blood on his hands.

 

Each time it happens, Rey rushes to his side, pulls him around corners and into supply closets to kiss the distress that creases his brow away.

 

“I love you,” she murmurs into his hair, “you’re not alone.” Ben clings to her and lays his lips along the thin skin that her pulse hammers beneath.

 

His hands are fire at his hips every night, guiding her down onto the length of his cock, smoothing down her back when she’s seated in his lap. Ben leans back on one arm, stares up at her like she’s pulled the moon down from the sky, and _groans_ when she pulls her hips up to lay a series of open mouthed kisses along his neck. She’s got her back to the door, freckles illuminated by the slanting light that filters in from the ‘fresher, and Ben doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything more beautiful.

 

Her hips slide back down, calloused fingers digging into his shoulders for support as she sets a pace that sends his toes curling. Ben wraps his arm around her waist, lays the flat of his tongue against the skin at her throat, and drags it up, so focused on the way she gasps and clenches around him that he doesn’t hear the knock at her door until it’s entirely too late.

 

Rey continues to move against him, caught up in the heat of his lips on her shoulder, and the lazy thrust of his hips up into her to notice the sound of her door opening.

 

“Rey, I wanted to get your opinion on the status of hyperdrive replacement on the fl-” the thought dies on Poe’s lips as soon as he registers the sight before him. Rey freezes, seated fully on Ben’s lap and painfully close to orgasm, pupils blown wide as she attempts to process the situation. Ben raises one eyebrow over the soft slope of Rey’s shoulder, removes the arm around her waist slowly, and slams the door shut with a deft tug on the Force.

 

Rey swears, breath huffing out over his chest as she squirms; Ben doesn’t bother to hide the grin that splits his face when he rolls his hips and earns a moan.

 

“Where were we?”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for a very fun four word prompt game over on tumblr: "will you marry me?"

She’s up to her elbows in the TIE Silencer when he asks her, voice low and warm like it was in the hut on Ahch-to all those months ago. The resistance hangar is silent, lit only by Ben’s work-lights that send long shadows dancing from the landing gears of powered down X-Wings; and Rey cannot stop herself from staring as his profile when he reaches up into the paneling to curl his fingers around the offending piece of machinery. They’ve been working on the Silencer for the better part of six lunar cycles, slowly tearing out all of the First Order mandated tracking devices wired deep into the hull of the ship.

 

Ben works on the project with a single-minded intensity that sets Rey on fire, blisters her right to the bone. He loves the ship in a way that echoes Han Solo absolutely, send memories of his father curling into the space between their chests and the underbelly of the ship. Together they spend what feels like years shoulder to shoulder, engine coolant dripping down their arms as they work. Ben shows her how to identify the hallmark construction of First Order wiring, Rey teaches him how to strip them of their insulation to get to the tracking components and repurpose the bulk of their material from there.

 

It’s warm, a kind of peace Rey isn’t used to; so different from clawing her way through the skeletal remains of Star Destroyers on her own. His fingers linger against the skin of her stomach when he reaches across her for hex wrenches, warm and reverent as if she’s some deity or one of the sacred texts that lean against the wall of their chamber. Ben’s fingers curl around the wrench in the same moment that he rolls onto one elbow to hover above her, head just barely brushing the Silencer’s paneling.

 

“Rey,” he breathes, voice falling soft against her skin and the vine-like wires that hang down around them. She licks her lips, tries for a smile, and is promptly cut short by Ben’s mouth against her own. Ben takes his time with kissing her, pushes the race of his heart across the bond even as he slides his tongue into her mouth. By the time they pull apart he’s settled into the cradle of her hips, hex wrench still clutched in his hand where it lays just above her head.

 

There’s a beat, a moment of tension where the only movement is the lazy swing of wires disrupted by Ben’s sudden movement, and Rey cannot miss the anxiety that colors his end of the bond.

 

“Rey,” he tries again, dips his head to brush his nose along the curve of her cheek, sends her heart racing wildly in her throat.

 

“Will you marry me?”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the prompt: kylo attempting to seduce Rey and failing miserably because Rey Doesn't Do Subtle
> 
> (which was an absolute JOY to write)

Rey is not particularly attuned to subtlety. The whole idea isn’t exactly foreign to her, but it’s not a language she speaks as deftly as binary, or a concept she feels as intuitively as she does the Force. On Jakku, there had only been ‘yes’ and ‘no’ (and all too often, Rey had seen even that distinction get hopelessly blurred). Since leaving the orange sands of her home planet, Rey hasn’t found herself in any situations where she particularly wants a better grasp of social subtleties.

 

That is, until Ben Solo came barreling into her world smelling of rocket fuel and the same Alderaanian spices that hang on Leia’s breath. Everything about Ben is subtle, from the way his eyes go soft at the edges when he sees her, to the puff of his upper lip right before he says something he’s uncertain of. If Rey is a haboob, then Ben is the soft kind of breeze that plays across her face on Takodana. She notices it most when the light cycle draws to a close and the Resistance base dims its lights until it’s almost like they’re back in her hut on Ahch-to; Ben seems to come alive then, when there aren’t any sharp eyes watching, distrust heavy in the air.

 

He leans his head against her thigh while she disassembles the hilt of her saber, lays out the components with an almost military precision as he sprawls out across the mattress. They’ve been on Geonosis for almost four lunar cycles now, and Ben seems to relax more into the shadows of her bunk with each passing month. Their Force bond almost seems to never quite close now, humming softly in the back of Rey’s mind right next to where she keeps her softest memories of him.

 

“Rey,” he murmurs, eyes heavy and dark from where they gaze up at her, “Rey look at me.” She does as she’s told, tears her eyes away from the kyber crystal in her hands and wonders at the sudden heat that floods the bond. Ben is nearly luminous against her sheets, wild curls spilling across her leg when he turns his head to press his lips against the thin fabric of her leggings.  

 

“You should work on your saber later,” his voice is low, rough at the edges in a way that sends a flush all the way down to the tops of Rey’s breasts, and she takes a second to shakily breathe before replying.

 

“But I’ve already got it disassembled now?” Ben bites his lip, rolls onto his forearms to pepper kisses up the side of her bicep, pauses right before his lips begin to lave their love against the skin of her throat.

 

“It isn’t going to go anywhere, sweetheart.” His hands dip the mattress down and a few of the smaller converters skitter down into the depression and Rey doesn’t bother to stop her (admittedly mild) irritation from coloring her end of the bond.

 

“Well of course it isn’t, Ben.” Nimble fingers set to recovering the wayward pieces of machinery, “it’s a lightsaber, not a BB unit.”

 

Her lover lets out a sigh so gusty it stirs her hair, and collapses back onto the mattress, forehead pressed forlornly to her knee. Rey rolls her eyes, cards a hand through his hair, and chooses to ignore his whine when she returns both hands to saber maintenance.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the four word prompt: "i'm not wearing that."  
> i think this lives in the same universe as _gradients_ but by no means is it necessary to read that piece to enjoy this one

Varykino is possibly the most beautiful place Rey has ever seen since stepping foot onto the _Millennium Falcon._ Even Takodana with its sprawling forests and Maz’s palace pales in comparison to the warm waters and golden sunshine of Ben’s ancestral summer home. They’re here on business, hurried along on a political mission by General Organa in the wake of Ben’s restructuring of the First Order. His mother had smiled, eyes twinkling in a way Rey had come to wholly distrust as she’d handed them the details on a sleek, silver datapad.

 

“Naboo is our family’s home,” the greying Princess-turned-General-turned-Advisor had nodded, hands folding into the sweeping length of her sleeves, “theirs is a royal family we need on our side.” Ben had nodded, and Rey had swallowed, eyes wide at the words italicized across the top of the mission statement, particularly cowed by _ball_ and _formal attire_ (if Leia had noticed the ripple in the Force when Ben reached out across the bond to comfort her, she didn’t mention it).

 

If she’d thought med droids were invasive, Rey had no clue what that made the slender droids that rushed into their bunk, whirring and cooing as they set about taking measurements. The Supreme Leader seemed well accustomed to the invasion, eyes half shut as he ran through the fitting process with lazily familiar movements; Rey couldn’t say the same for herself as she stumbled away from the cool appendage that moved to measure her inseam.

 

Late autumn in Naboo was a singularly incredible sight. As far as the eye could see the hills were golden, dotted here and there with ruby clusters of the vineyard grapes the system was so known for. Ben seems to come alive under the gentle sun, eyes lighting up golden against the deep blue of his traditional Alderaanian formal wear when they trace the freckles that dot her shoulders. Rey smiles, leans her head against his chest as they stand on the balcony together, overlooking the vast expanse of Naboo’s lake country, and runs her finger over the intricate metal filigree at his throat.

 

“Will my robes for the event look like this?” She asks against the stiff navy fabric, lets her desire to feel his skin under her fingers trickle across their bond as Ben thinks for a second.

 

“Not quite,” he shrugs, pulling her closer against the cool breeze, “I’d expect my mother to dress you more traditionally than this, flowing fabrics and all that.” Rey nods like she knows what that means, and can’t be bothered to try and hide her glee when he turns them so that her back presses against the polished marble railing behind them. “But if it were up to me,” he presses a series of delicate, open mouthed kisses along the line of her throat, “I wouldn’t have you in anything at all.”

 

Ben’s face lights up when they round the corner into their chamber and the late afternoon light that spills languidly across the warm toned furnishings within. She’s so caught off guard by the open expression that it takes Rey a second to marshal her stare to what’s caught his attention; when she finally does she feels her stomach drop right to the marble beneath her feet. Laid carefully across their bed, not a single drape out of place, are a matching set of deep onyx robes.

 

As Ben had predicted, her set is airy, lifting at the edges where the breeze picks it up and off of the mattress. The whole gown looks to be made of gossamer, tumbling down from the ornate silver throat piece that appeared to make up the primary structure of the bodice before looping back up in carefully chosen layers to engulf her arms at the elbow. Her throat goes dry as she looks at it, anxiety only compounded at the unbridled excitement that pours across the bond from Ben.

 

“I’m not wearing that,” she mumbles, shaking her head and stuffing suddenly clammy hands deep into the pockets of her tunic. In an instant Ben is in front of her, calloused palms cupping her cheeks to gently guide her eyes up to his.

 

“Why not, Sweetheart?” The endearment rings in her ears and Rey remembers the night he’d first pushed soft memories of his parents across their bond, how she’d held him when his shoulders had begun to shake. Rey inhales, brings her fingers up to trace the metal at his throat again, and struggles to form the words she wants.

 

“I,” she pushes images of a small girl scrambling through the skeletal remains of Star Destroyers, “I’m not,” of teenaged her wiping tears and blood from her face in the aftermath of a deal gone horribly wrong, “I don’t belong in the courts of Naboo.” Ben’s breath leaves him like the hot winds that precede a haboob, and then she is in his arms.

 

“I don’t either,” he whispers into hair lit up nearly golden by the setting sun, meets her memories with ones of his own: of fire and darkness and the sound of bone beneath his boots. Rey clings a little tighter to his broad back, hides her face against the starched blue fabric and tries not to cry. “But we’re here,” he strokes a palm down her back, “and we’re together,” runs it back up, fingertips just skimming her vertebrae, “and it’ll be alright.” Rey nods, allows him to tilt her head up and rain reverent kisses across her cheeks before claiming his lips in a kiss of her own.

 

“I love you,” Ben presses into the skin at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

 

“I know,” she replies, carding her fingers through his always wild hair.

 

She does wear the dress in the end, watches with wide eyes in the mirror as Ben expertly hooks the elaborate series of eyelets at her back closed. His movements are carefully practiced, gentle when he arranges her hair atop her head, and more tender than she’s ever seen as he sets glittering clusters of gems into soft brunette curls.

 

“I used to help my mother get ready,” he offers by way of explanation when he’s done, lips brushing against her bare shoulder blades as he speaks “her way of carrying on old customs, I guess.” Rey nods, marvels at the pair of them in the mirror, and cannot stop the flush that rises to her cheeks when Ben lets the sound of her dark dress being ripped ring across the bond.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the prompt: Kylo romantically declares his love for Rey in canon. Bonus points if it’s in front of both first order and resistance ;)
> 
> (i couldn't get the first order in there proper, but i think i got enough of the resistance in for it to maaaayyyybe count!)

Geonosis, though not at first glance as obviously hostile a planet as Jakku, is still a far cry from habitable. Dusty fingers tighten around the controls, and Rey watches as almost-familiar, undulating terrain whips away beneath the barely functional Resistance speeder (tries not to dwell too much on her homeworld). Three of the fifteen moons that orbit the planet are beginning to crest over the horizon, pale and luminous against the distant dunes like some great pearl; Rey cannot help but think how poorly the beautiful scene fits their current predicament.

 

Anakin’s saber-turned-staff sits heavily across her shoulder girdle, its weight a small amount of calm as it collects sweat and sand on Rey’s furious ride back towards the Resistance base. They’ve been hidden away on Geonosis for nearly five lunar cycles now and like some great tome opening up before her, the planet welcomes Rey with memories of battles long won, and a young man with Ben Solo’s hair (and heart).

 

The first time the pale blue ghost had flickered to life beside her Rey had nearly shit herself, there and then with her arms up to the shoulder in one of the many dilapidated ships that decorated the Resistance hangar.

 

“A mechanic, I see,” he’d quipped, ducking down to peer at her with unsettlingly sharp eyes where she lay startled among her tools. Rey had just thrown a hex wrench at him, mouth pressing into a fine line when it sailed through his right shoulder.

 

If she’d thought that having _one_ Skywalker male popping in and out of her consciousness constantly had been exhausting, having _two_ wild eyed men chasing each other through her daily life was certainly going to put Rey in the grave. The Force had taken to connecting her and Ben either appallingly early in the morning, or so late at night that one (or both) of them were usually asleep when it happened.

 

It had become routine, to wake up with the Supreme Leader’s arm slung around her waist, and the soft chuff of his breath fanning out across the nape of her neck. Rey relishes it every morning, basks in the warmth of his body beside hers, the slowly budding realization that she really _will_ never be alone. He always wakes up a few minutes after her, bleary eyed and smiling when she dusts kisses across his collarbones.

 

“G’morning Sweetheart,” he’d mumbled just two light cycles ago, calloused palms warm where they’d curled around thin hips to pull her even closer against his chest. They’d spent almost an entire standard hour there, tangled in her sheets and reveling in the fact that they were _together_.

 

The force hadn’t connected them the next morning, or the one after that, and now Rey almost dreads going to bed for fear of the fact that when she wakes up the next morning it will be by herself. Anakin seems to have disappeared along with his grandson as well, leaving Rey alone in her head with nothing but the all too familiar desert winds for company. That is, until ten light cycles later (meticulously etched into the durasteel above her bunk) when Rey is woken up by the scream of the Resistance’s alarm system.

 

“What’s going on?” She pants, hurtling into the Command center against the tide of frantic pilots making for the hangar. It’s Pava who answers her, lips set in a grim line.

 

“First Order fighters have broken atmo, ten TIE-fighters and a Silencer.”

 

Rey’s blood runs cold.

 

Turning on her heel, she joins the herd of Resistance fighters heading for the hangar doors, and makes it out onto the red sand landing pad just in time to wince at the scream of TIE-fighters overhead. Whipping her gaze up, Rey counts six still in action, pursuing the Silencer in what’s very obviously an offensive formation. _Ben!_ She flings across the bond, heart in her throat as she’s met only with the desperate drum of his heart and the feeling of controls under bare hands.

 

Grabbing a passing pilot by the shoulder she snags the helmet off of their head and desperately thumbs the call button.

 

“Poe.”

 

“Right here, Blue-“ There’s a pause as he registers her voice, Rey keeps her eyes trained on the Silencer as it shrieks up into the atmosphere, TIE-fighters hot on its heels. “Rey?”

 

“Don’t take down that Silencer,” she commands, voice only gaining in strength as Ben urges his ship into a near vertical dive, takes out another one of the fighters with his ventral blaster (there are only five angling after him now). “Watch how the fighters are pursing it- they’re trying to shoot him down.”

 

Poe swears, and she can only imagine the string of binary expletives pouring out of BB-8; the pilot she’s still clinging to shouts, and Rey snaps her eyes off the sky long enough to hand the helmet back to its owner. Geonosis seems to pulse, the planet itself caught up in the battle above its shifting red sands, and Rey can’t help the frantic beat of her heart as the X-Wings take off into the air, rocket fuel hanging heavy in her nose.

 

When Ben’s TIE-Silencer crashes into the dunes immediately outside of the base, Rey is the first one there, flanked closely by the entire ground force of the Resistance, and General Organa from the comfort of a speeder. The ship is smoking, electricity crackling along the sharp lines of its ventral apparatus, and if it weren’t for the pulse of his Force signature from within the shattered cockpit, Rey would be sure Ben was dead.

 

 _I can’t get the transmission function to disengage_ , Ben growls across the bond only seconds before he comes shouldering out of the wreckage, looking like he hasn’t slept in at least five light cycles. Rey clutches her saberstaff, motions for the soldiers behind her to lower their weapons when they instantly settle into an offensive stance, and takes a few, nervous steps towards Ben. She can feel the eyes of every Resistance fighter on her back, still hear the furious scream of X-Wings as they chase down the last two TIE-fighters flying. But none of it matters, not when Ben mouths her name, eyes wide and desperate as they trace over her lips, the slope of her shoulder where it rises to hold fire.

 

“Rey,” he breathes, so softly it’s almost lost beneath the sound of his Silencer slowly settling against the cool evening air. Ben steps into her, raises his hands to her waist in the same second that he drops to his knees, face pressed into the loose folds of her tunic.

 

She cards her fingers through his hair, forces him to meet her gaze even as the crowd behind them starts to restlessly shift.

 

“Ben,” some of the tension in his face eases, “what happened?”

 

“Hux staged a coup,” The second to last Skywalker swallows, eyes beseeching even as she strokes the sweat and soot from his brow, “I just barely got out.”

 

The swell of rage that rises in Rey’s chest at the thought of Ben falling to Hux’s hand startles both of them; and somewhere she’s sure she hears the ghost of a laugh on the wind.

 

“Anakin-“ Ben swallows, peers at his mother who had since disembarked from her speeder and closed some of the distance between them to listen, “my grandfather came to warn me, helped me escape.” Leia and Rey inhale twin gasps, and Ben presses his forehead against her stomach before continuing.

 

“He said he couldn’t see his grandson make the same mistakes he did.” Rey doesn’t need to look back to know that Leia’s cheeks are damp and shining underneath the fourteenth moon to clear the dunes.

 

 _I love you,_ he pushes across the bond, arms curling tight around her when Rey presses her knees into the red sand to better dust her lips across his temple. Ben sags into her chest, hides his face against her neck as the fifteenth moon begins to clear the horizon, heedless of his mother just a scant few paces away from them, or the army that stands baffled behind her.

 

“I know,” is all Rey offers in reply, for fear that if she continues she’ll join Leia in tears. “I know.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: " just stay with me", and "i really need you" with kylo begging rey. If she leaves or not is up to you. lay it on thick. i want to feel this in my gut.
> 
> (in my defense, you literally asked for this)

It has been six lunar cycles since Ben Solo had watched Rey disappear behind the doors of his late father’s ship. Six lunar cycles spent alone in his head, free for the first time in his life of Snoke, and free suddenly from the small, bright voice he’d come to cherish. He still has a film of Crait’s signature red salt on the toes of his boots, still finds the grains burrowed deep into the weave of his outer layers and dusting the foot of his bed. Hux, on the other hand, is as pristine as ever, sweeping along behind Ben as they go from meeting to briefing and back again with his steamed black coat snapping behind him.

 

The _Finalizer_ is oppressively silent, weighing heavy against Ben’s shoulders when he listlessly paces the bridge late into the light cycle (he’s grown so sick of the sound of his heartbeat). The duraglass floors gleam up at him when he studies his boots, wholly indifferent to the Supreme Leader’s plight.

 

Everyone in the First Order, ironically save for Ben, wear masks. Some literal, like the polished gleam of Phasma’s chrome visage, or the hundreds of thousands of identical Stormtrooper helmets. Others less so, like the way Hux schools his face every time Ben enters a room, or the rambling, ossified old men who sit before Ben in board meetings, sucking in recycled air to fuel their diatribes. Ben hates it, wishes he could shatter every sneering façade with one clench of his fist, but instead he waits, plays his mother’s game from the head of the negotiations table.

 

Deep space is sterile, cold in a way that only exists this far from any planet’s gravitational pull. Ben can feel it in his fingers and the pulse of the Force around him, condensed solely to the occupants of his flagship Dreadnought. Beyond him there is nothing but stars, and even they aren’t really more than the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen and helium. He starts to wear a few more layers each day, spends a little more time at the beginning of the light cycle pulling carefully tailored pieces over his head.

 

Slowly, he starts to sleep less, and stay up later and later into each night cycle. Hux no longer follows at his heels, and though Ben loathes the silence of the _Finalizer,_ he does not miss the snap of Hux’s coattails behind him. He becomes almost a ghost, silently walking the gleaming halls of his flagship, refusing to attend meetings unless via holo (he finds he has more patience for the entitled old windbags if he’s not in the same room as them).

 

There’s a coup brewing, he can feel it in every breath of the recycled air, sharp at the edges with adrenaline. He doesn’t yet know when it will come, just that he will be ready, and that it will not be successful. The sensation is particularly strong as Ben stands on the bridge, hands folded behind his back as he watches the Stormtroopers practice formations on the deck beneath him. He doesn’t know when the _Finalizer_ and the steady hum of its hyperdrive engines had begun to feel like one of the old tomb worlds of Sith lore. Certainly though, this couldn’t be Korriban, or he wouldn’t have to wear so many layers of cloth just to be able to feel his fingers.

 

Ben starts to lose track of how many days its been since he made planetfall, how many standard light cycles have passed since his boots have had actual, real dirt beneath their tread, and not the polished duraglass that floors the _Finalizer_. Each morning he lays back against his pillows like a corpse at a viewing, wishes for air in his bloodstream (or Rey in his bed). He can’t pinpoint when the little desert girl had maneuvered her way into the spaces between his ribs, but he feels her with every expansion of his ribcage, wants desperately for her presence in his occipital region. Resigned to his isolation, Ben lies back and watches as wavering starlight plays across the ceiling, he has a meeting in thirty standard minutes, and should start getting dressed soon.

 

Later that day finds Ben locked in the training room below deck, saber in one hand and isolation sitting heavy on his shoulders as he runs through the opening forms of his favorite offensive flow. An armored combat droid in the corner watches him with unblinking monitors, waiting for Ben’s cue to begin its onslaught. It seems fitting, he thinks dryly, wincing only slightly at the tug of old injuries in his shoulder when he swings the crackling blade back around his head, that another Skywalker wastes away in deep space with only droids (and shortcomings) for company.

 

In the hot, sweaty moments immediately following his sparring session Ben dwells on what it might be like to go to Rey, renounce his title and saber to simply follow her across the galaxy, heart in his hands (wonders if she’d even take him). Something in his stomach assures him she would, reminds him of the way it had felt when their fingers touched, how her eyes had swum with so much unsaid as the _Falcon’s_ doors slid shut in front of her.

 

The _Finalizer_ begins to feel more and more like a grave with each light cycle, until Ben thinks he can feel the soil in his lungs (imagines it dark and damp against the pink of his respiratory tissue). The Force connects them almost exactly ten lunar cycles after Crait, announcing its presence with an absence of ambient noise and the tide like swell of breathing against his hip. Glancing down and away from his datapad in surprise, Ben is met with the image of Rey asleep, curled into a tight little ball with her freckled nose just inches from his hip.

 

She doesn’t wake, and Ben goes back to skimming over the plans for upgrades to the Dreadnought fleet, distracted every time her fingers curl slightly atop his blankets as she dreams. They spend the whole night like that, and ben eagerly takes the opportunity to memorize the curve of her cheek, how her lashes flutter with REM sleep. He’s never felt more alone, datapad held limply in trembling hands as he watches her sleep.

 

When it happens next, Ben is the one asleep, eyes closed in the closest thing to rest he’s gotten in at least the last three weeks. It’s interrupted, however, by a sudden feeling of being _watched_ , and the responding fear that tears across his consciousness. When he opens his eyes, lightsaber hilt already in hand, Ben feels his breath rush out of him with all the force of an orbital autocannon at the sight of Rey standing over his bed. She’s beautiful, even in half light and the shroud of panic that still colors his vision, eyes wide and full of tears.

 

“Ben,” she whispers, fingers reaching for his face right as the Force bends and whips her away.

 

 

After waking up to Rey in his room, Ben continues about in much the same way as he had for the last ten lunar cycles: train, shower, attend whatever host of meetings Hux has lined up for him through the holo, eat, train, sleep. It’s monotonous, grates at his senses much the same way the stifling silence of deep space did against his tympanic membranes. He can feel their bond again, small and hopeful underneath his occipital ridge, clings to the little spark when the _Finalizer_ feels particularly tomb-like, or when he feels the grave soil in his lungs at night. Ben doesn’t know when he’ll see her next, but he’s now sure he will, and the thought loosens his chest just slightly, makes even more room for Rey between his ribs.

 

As it turns out, the next time the force connects them is a week and two days after he’d woken up to her standing over his bed (a week and two days in which Ben had done almost nothing but wish for her to appear beside him again). When it happens, he’s in the middle of an admittedly boring meeting with the Iridonian delegates, negotiating use of their planet for an experimental training program. Much to the tangible displeasure of Hux, he has his back turned to the holo, eyes focused out the sweeping windows that line one side of his chambers, barely listening as one irritating Zabrak representative futilely pleads his case. There’s a moment of relief when the tinny holo audio vanishes, and then her reflection a few steps behind his in the window.

 

Struggling to keep his expression blank and not to let the wild jump of his heart show through in any physical motions, Ben turns to the holo and addresses the flustered protestations with one raised eyebrow,

 

“We will resume this at 1700 standard.” He declares, no room left for negotiation even as Hux makes a strangled noise somewhere off-screen. Deftly, Ben powers off the holo with a well practice flick of his wrist and finally, _finally_ lets his gaze fall upon the woman before him.

 

She speaks first, stepping towards him as if it hadn’t been literal months since they’d last seen each other (and as if those few, fleeting encounters hadn’t left him wanting for her breath on his lips).

 

“When was the last time you slept?” There’s nothing but honest, genuine concern in her voice, and it settles in Ben’s stomach like a stone.

 

He shrugs, casts his eyes down to her lips and allows Rey to close the distance between them. When she stops, breath coming in short, trembling puffs, she’s so close he could reach out and run gloved fingers down the line of her throat without even fully extending his arm (an urge he resists with monumental effort).

 

“Last night,” a lie.

 

Rey reaches out and traces her fingers over one dark circle, lets her thumb rest just beneath his eye as she finishes the stroke. He exhales shakily and turns his face into the touch, lips resting on the meat of her thumb as Rey studies him. Ben doesn’t think he’s felt so alive, so comfortable with the staccato drum of his heart in his ears since before Crait, since that night in her hut. He struggles to breathe, can’t focus past her scent in his nose or even begin to stop himself as he whispers,

 

“Stay with me.” Rey’s eyebrows draw up and together, dangerously close to crying, and her fingers tightening against his cheek.

 

“You know I can’t.” And he _does_ , but that doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow, doesn’t stop him from pressing a kiss into her palm.

 

“I need you,” his voice falls brokenly across the room, hits the unadorned durasteel walls like blaster fire. Rey looks for all the world like she’s about to kiss him, lips parted sweetly as she moves to stand fully in his arms (when they’d come up to circle her waist, Ben isn’t sure).

 

Instead, she presses something small and warm with body heat into his hand, right before the Force crashes into them both like one of the waves on Ahch-to, and Ben is once again alone in his chambers. The Supreme Leader casts his gaze up to the ceiling, clenches his jaw against the onslaught of emotions, and takes a steeling breath. After ten minutes of almost-meditation he unfolds his hand wearily and cannot stop the tears that fall at the little beacon blinking innocuously up at him.

 

 

 Ten standard hours later he’s tucked his saber into his belt and snuck out into the hangar, eyes sharp from underneath his hood as he persuades the few, feeble-minded officers manning the atmo-traffic into clearing his Silencer for departure. The beacon rests warm against his chest where he’d strung it on a loose bit of wire, a token of luck, and maybe something more as he boards his ship and uses his hold over the bridge agent’s minds to hide his tracks.

 

When he falls to his knees in front of his mother, her army and Rey in front of them all, he comes bearing only the beat of his heart, and his lightsaber offered up in a show of good intention (the Force practically _sings_ around them).

 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for the prompt: What about a sexy one, Kylo and Rey have force bond sexy times while one of them is in a public place

She’s underneath the belly of an ailing X-Wing when it happens; the Force shifts, draws tight for a second like the cables that hold the wings and fuselage together, and suddenly Ben Solo is beside her. Judging by the slow rise and fall of his (bare) chest he’s asleep, stretched out with his head pillowed on one arm and his hair spilling wildly across his face. They must be on different light cycles, Rey notes, as it’s nearly noon where she is, and the hangar bustles with pilots and droids around her. Ben lets out a particularly deep breath, unconsciously shifts a hair closer to her, and settles back in against his arm. They stay like that for the better part of a standard hour: Rey working diligently on the craft above her, unwilling to let her focus be shattered by the man beside her, and Ben softly breathing from his spot next to her soldering iron.

 

He doesn’t wake until she’s more than halfway done recalibrating the stabilizers, nose scrunched as she worms one arm into the hull to adjust the pressure sensor. At first she doesn’t notice, continues to do battle with the stubborn machinery until a pair of scuffed boots appear at the edge of the craft, and Poe’s familiar voice calls from beside the nose.

 

“Making any headway with the old girl?”

 

Rey startles, pulls her upper body out of the hull, and then startles again at the pair of dark eyes watching her from the ground.

 

“I,” Ben tilts his head slightly, half lit by her thready work lights, “Yeah, I’m doing fine Poe, thanks for checking!” The Supreme Leader rolls off of his side and onto his back, eyes hot on Rey when she realizes that _yes_ it must be morning wherever he is.

 

“Glad to hear it!” Rey rolls her eyes and hopes against all odds that the Pilot will leave, throat dry as she watches Ben’s fingers wander down towards the tent in his sleep pants. He smirks, pushes an image of her hand around his cock across the bond, and thrills at the blush that leaps to Rey’s cheeks in response. “So, I’ve been wondering about rewiring the KX12s to shorten their refractory period, do you think they could handle that?”

 

Rey’s never wanted to talk about laser canons less in her life. Unable to resist the sight of her lover stroking himself to the sight of her sweaty and slicked with engine grease, Rey retracts her arms from the hull of the ship and settles back onto the cold concrete with a sigh. The Supreme Leader rewards her with another image, this time of her mouth around his tip, hot and slick, and Rey lowers herself down onto one elbow. She watches Ben begin to pump with wide eyes and struggles not to let it show in her voice when she responds to Poe.

 

“Probably, yeah,” she bites her lip when Ben’s head tilts back, throat straining against a moan, “but I think it would result in a higher rate of burnout.” He’s watching her again, gaze heavy on the curve of her lip, the way her pebbled nipples show through the thin fabric of her work tunic. _Take them off,_ Rey begs over the bond, barely fights back a groan when he obeys, hand pulling away from his shaft just long enough to shimmy his pants down his legs.

 

He’s spread out in front of her, all pale skin and constellations of moles, more precious than any piece of hardware Rey’s ever managed to scavenge. She can tell he’s close, see it in the twitch of his hip flexors and the way his cheeks have started to flush, and more than anything Rey wants to reach across the scant distance between them and _touch_. But Poe’s boots still hover at the edge of the fighter, and she knows she shouldn’t take the risk (instead, she lets an image of her on her knees, lips wrapped around his shaft filter across).

 

Ben comes with her name on his lips and the phantom stroke of her tongue across the head of his cock. Poe’s boots shuffle just a few feet away, and Rey feels her heart in her throat when he leans down to peer beneath the belly,

 

“Did you hear me? I asked if you thought we could avoid that by rewiring the charging mechanism?” Rey huffs, tries not to shift her thighs for fear of whimpering, and glances up at the pilot before snapping.

 

“Probably not Poe,” the Force draws tight around her, “can I please get back to work?” Hands up in a placating gesture, Dameron withdraws, brows pulled up towards his hairline as he disappears from view. By the time Rey looks back down to where Ben had been, he’s gone, the only evidence of the whole encounter the wet heat between her legs.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: "why are you bleeding"

A life of bone blistering survival has taught Rey a good many things: how to lie through the white of her teeth, how to fall asleep when hunger erodes the lining of her stomach like soft metal under the sand, and maybe most importantly, how to hide wounds. On Jakku, any sign of weakness was as good as a death sentence, letting blood or bandages show a surefire way to find yourself on the receiving end of a blaster. And Rey _knows_ that the Resistance is nothing like the arid planet she’d called home for so long, knows that if she darkened the door of the medbay she could be patched up almost instantly, but there are some things steeped too far into her bones to shake, and the instinct to _survive_ is one of them.

 

Which is why, when she loses her step navigating the scaffolding that crisscrosses the ceiling of their newest hideout, a mine-turned-base built into one of the many mountains that dot the surface of Talus, she hastily compresses the laceration that tears up her arm and darts away to her bunk. Out of the shadowy half-light that comes with the scaffolding the wound looks even worse than she’d initially anticipated. Its edges are rough, torn jaggedly to reveal what few globs of adipose she’d managed to cultivate since leaving Jakku. Rey bites her lip, grabs the (expired) sanitation spray she’d lifted off the _Falcon_ a few lunar cycles ago, and sprays the gash down before setting about tearing an old tunic down into uneven strips.

 

It’s then (of course) that the Force flexes, announces itself with an absence of sound followed by the sudden appearance of the Supreme Leader, sweeping and regal in his dark robes. Ben turns to face her, cloak swirling around his feet in a way that almost makes Rey go dizzy, and there’s a moment that hangs in the air when his face softens incrementally. It abruptly ends the second he spots the blood that wells up between her fingers where she’d begun to close the wound, one end of a strip pinned between her thumb and the skin of her bicep. Ben’s eyes narrow and he holds up a hand, turning to face someone she cannot see as he growls,

 

“Enough.” Dark brows draw down towards his eyes as he glowers past the far wall of her bunk, “we’ll reconvene tomorrow at 0800.” Ben stands still for a handful of seconds, watching ruffled dignitaries exit a conference room, Rey assumes through the pain, before closing the distance between them with two long strides.

 

“Rey,” his voice is gentle, softer than she’s ever heard it save for the incandescent moments immediately following sex when he cradles her against his chest and nearly croons, “sweetheart why are you bleeding?” She’s too busy clenching her jaw to properly explain, so instead Rey shoves the memory of her fall across the bond, graceless with the pain that tears through her muscle fibers. Ben blinks, nods once, and attempts to pull her fingers away from the wound only to be met with a grip gone iron with panic.

 

“No,” Rey whispers, heart in her throat as she blinks up at her lover wide eyed, “please no.” It was bad enough that he’d literally caught her red handed, she didn’t need him to see just how deep the laceration went, didn’t need the full extent of her weakness laid bare to the man across from her. The bond must have let the sentiment leak through, as in the next second Ben’s brow had knit, eyes dark as he stared at her from parsecs and parsecs away.

 

“One laceration doesn’t make you weak, Rey,” he nearly growled, peeling leather gloves off with all the ceremony of a medic going into surgery. “Sweetheart I can’t help you if you don’t let me see.” Rey feels her heart beating wildly against her sternum and reaches for Ben’s presence in the Force, barely has to brush the surface of him before he’s sweeping into the memories of Jakku and its disdain for the wounded that she’s pulled to the surface.

 

When he withdraws, blinking blood and sand from his eyes, the first thing Ben does is kiss her. It’s not particularly soft, desperate in the way she’s come to associate with Ben, a man made of lightsaber whine and rocket fuel.

 

“Rey please,” he begs, eyes earnest, “I just want to help you.” Swallowing thickly, she forces her fingers to uncurl from their vice grip on her arm, and Ben rewards her with a kiss dusted across her jaw. _Thank you,_ he mumbles across the bond, mouth pressed into a thin line as he delicately probes at the edges of the wound. Rey thinks, not for the first time (and certainly not for the last) that she loves him.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: “I can’t believe that I’m snowed in. With you”
> 
> (this got,,,, so out of hand)

Ben’s integration into the Resistance has been a slow, halting thing, not unlike a newborn fathier learning how to walk. He’s clumsy with his social interactions, still unused to interfacing without a mask (be it one of durasteel or military precision), and well aware of how little he is welcome on the base. Leia keeps her son busy, sending him on missions that allow him time alone, to process his thoughts and calm the winds of change that whip in his chest. He’s healing, Rey can feel it through the Force bond, slowly but steadily.

 

However, that’s the only indication Rey has, as the once Supreme Leader holds her entirely at arms-length. In fact, since she’d hauled him into their base, bloodied and sagging heavily against her side, Ben’s spoken fewer words to her than he had while she was on Ahch-To. She’s not stupid, hears the way the other Resistance members whisper about him in the mess hall, the most rational explanation is that he’s doing it out of some misplaced sense of protection.

 

Which is just the most idiotic thing Rey’s ever fucking heard (so it’s almost definitely what’s going on).

 

The tension between the two Force users is so palpable that Leia eventually takes notice, eyes soft at the edges over a steaming cup of Corellian tea when she invites Rey into her office.

 

“Rey,” she begins, every inch the caring mother, “what has my son done now?” The Last Jedi scowls, folds carefully wrapped arms over her chest and tries to look less angry than she actually is (to no avail).

 

“He won’t fucking _talk_ to me!” Her voice breaks a little on the word talk, and Princess-turned-General extends a warm hand her way across the desk.

 

“Oh sweetheart,” Rey tries not to cry at the term of endearment Ben had so frequently whispered over the bond, “he’s just scared.” Which is the _second_ most idiotic thing Rey’s ever heard (so she assumes that Leia is correct in the assumption).

 

But the would-be queen of Alderaan is a strategist second to none, and so Rey really shouldn’t be surprised when her comm blinks with a mission assignment the next morning. _Hoth_ it reads, and Rey shivers, _base scouting_ , which is easy enough, _partnered assignment_. At that, hazel eyes narrow, and Rey packs her flight bag, neck pricking with suspicion.

 

Sure enough, when she steps into the _Falcon_ it’s none other than Leia Organa-Solo’s wayward son himself who (doesn’t) greet her. Ben’s already planted himself in the pilot’s seat, shoulders hunched inward as he begins to run the preflight checks; his anxiety is a nearly visible thing in the Force, trembling and bright where it brushes against Rey’s mind. For a second her heart pangs, but then she remembers the sting of his cold shoulder and the last month spent wondering if she’d done something _wrong_ , and so Rey just huffs into the co-pilots seat with little grace and less charm.

 

The flight to Hoth is a silent one, filled with nothing more than the clink of Han’s dice where they still hang in the cockpit, and the hum of sublight engine units at work. Even without speaking, they work in tandem nearly perfectly, a fact that just sends Rey’s mouth pressing into an even finer line than before. Breaking atmo is turbulent, and by the time they’ve perched the _Falcon_ beside the old Rebellion base, it’s already clear that the planet is setting up for a raging storm. And sure enough, the winds hit about two standard hours into their exploration of the abandoned base, sending the two most powerful Force users in the Galaxy darting across the snow in an attempt to break atmo before it was too late.

 

It was too late.

 

The _Falcon_ , at least, had enough fuel to keep the craft warm through the projected duration of the storm, and then see them safely back to the fleet. So while actually staying alive wasn’t a particularly pressing concern, the fact that Rey now had to spend at least twelve standard hours trapped on a light freighter with the man who’d gone from dusting kisses across her temples to ducking into supply closets to avoid passing her in the hall still made chances of survival seem slim.

 

“I cannot believe,” she grumbles, standing the center of the commons, halfway out of her winter flight suit, “that I’m fucking snowed in,” Rey steps out of the crinkling metallic fabric and shoots Ben a glare, “with _you._ ”

 

The former Supreme Leader says nothing, just turns his head to the side and offers an apologetic brush against her mind.  Rey folds her suit, grabs sodden boots from where she’d toed them off by the door and makes towards the back of the ship to set both in her bunk. Ben follows her, silent and sulking with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his flight pants.

 

“What is your problem?” Rey nearly growls, completely uninterested in turning back to look at the man behind her.

 

“You’ve been here a month and haven’t said _shit_ to me.” Still nothing, save for the quiet pad of his bare feet against the durasteel floor. Rey fumes, feels the wild energy she usually associates with battle rising in her chest. With all the delicacy of a lightsaber igniting, Rey pulls her lips back and bites out,

 

“Not so sure you love me now that we’re in the same sector of the galaxy?” That gets a reaction.

 

Ben stops dead in his tracks, bond more open that it’s been in the last four weeks with his surprise. Ever the opportunist, Rey takes full advantage of his lowered guard and pushes her worry, the weight on her chest when she realizes that _maybe_ she’d misinterpreted their whole relationship, nights spent alone and fighting the urge to start tallying the days since last he spoke to her. His eyes are wide, brows knitting as he runs the information over again and again, turning it over until he feels he understands it enough to speak.

 

“Rey,” he tries, eyes surely beseeching where they bore into her back. She doesn’t turn, only keys open the door to her bunk and steps inside, Ben hot on her heels. “Sweetheart,” he murmurs from the doorframe, and Rey nearly sees red.

 

“Don’t _call_ me that,” she snarls, whipping around to face him for the first time since this whole debacle had started. “You haven’t spoken to me in nearly _five weeks,”_ the former Supreme Leader doesn’t look all that supreme as she advances across the room, “you do not get to call me _sweetheart!”_ Ben swallows, puffs his upper lip out as he studies her, and when he speaks his voice is so soft and so _sad_ that Rey feels her anger extinguished as quickly as if the entire ocean around Ahch-To had been dumped on it.

 

“You don’t hear what they say about me,” he offers, eyes downcast even as he takes a step in towards her, “I can’t-“ he chances a glance up, seems to find some hope in her expression and presses on, still drawing closer. “I don’t want to alienate you from the only family you’ve known.” Rey’s breath leaves her in a soft chuff, and she stares up at the man who now stands no more than a hairsbreadth away from her.

 

“Ben,” she sighs, reaching out to idly toy with the two front belt loops of his flight pants, “you’re such a nerf herder.” _You don’t need to worry,_ Rey pushes across the bond along with the warmth in her heart, _I’m certainly not._ Ben smiles down at her, Force signature feeling like his own for the first time since he’d stumbled out of his TIE Silencer and into their hangar, and Rey only hesitates a second before rising up onto her toes to kiss him. They pull apart slowly, Ben’s arms wrapped tight around her waist, and Rey’s hands on either side of his face.

 

“So sweetheart,” he rumbles, grinning when she flushes at the endearment, “what do you want to do until the storm breaks?”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is all maddy's fault/for meg, because she wanted smut and who am i to deny the people

Rey hadn’t stayed on the blustery cliffs of Ahch-To long enough to find out what exactly the Jedi Code had to say about masturbation, but even if she had, Rey knows she wouldn’t care. How could she when it was so _simple,_ so _easy_ to slip away into the cloistered warmth of her bunk when her head got too crowded, too full of Ben Solo’s eyes burning hotly somewhere near her occipital ridge to focus. Since shouldering the title of Last Jedi (a role Rey hardly thinks she fills, what with the constant whip of desert sun and vicious sand in her chest), the quiet act has gained a new level of intimacy.

 

Where before she’d always imagined some faceless trader, maybe a smuggler with clean fingernails and a smile that wasn’t cracked at the edges, now Rey’s half formed fantasies are all centered around one Ben Solo. She thinks on his hands most, how the worn leather of his gloves made just the barest of noise against the hilt of his saber, how she’d felt every fiber of his being begging to close the distance between them the second their fingers had touched on Ahch-To, wonders how it would feel to have their tips drag down the flat line of her sternum (and _lower_ ).

 

Tonight, as Rey lays back atop the threadbare blankets of her bunk, she dwells on the heat of his stare, how it seemed like his whole face had opened up to her as they stood in the throne room. She wonders, dipping her fingers into her mouth before delving between spread legs, if had she stayed, would he have taken her there (laid her out among the ashes and the heady smell of lightsaber combat, to press his devotion into slick skin).

 

Her breath catches, falls softly into the nearly silent room as she sets a slow pace against her clit, fingers a familiar comfort in the half-lit bunk. Rey bites her lip, imagines how she might have pushed wild curls damp with sweat back from his face to kiss him, sighs at the thought of him pressing her back into the polished duraglass floor. Slowly, her orgasm builds, pricking at the back of her neck and bleeding into her occipital region, overwhelming any other sensory input.

 

Which is exactly how she misses the soft _twang_ of the Force as it snaps Ben into her room. In fact, she might not have noticed him until she was well and finished had it not been for the percussive breath that escapes his lips at the sight of her spread out in front of him. Rey freezes, eyes flying open to stare up at Ben, panicked and wild in the face of her open legs (and even more open bond).

 

He’s licking his lips, pulse hammering away visibly in his throat as the details of her fantasy wash over him, and Rey wishes she could _move_ , will her body into doing _anything_ to break the tension that settles between them. The second she manages to will her hand to pull away, fingers wetly trailing up towards her belly button, Ben steps in until his knees brush the edge of the bed between her feet.

 

“No,” his upper lip puffs out, and Rey thinks she might cry with the heat of his gaze as it lazily travels up to rest on her face, “keep going.”

 

Rey does as he asks, hands shaking as she reestablishes her earlier pace, suddenly not so sure she can get off with only the press of thin fingers against her clit. The Supreme Leader’s stare is nearly tangible, heavy in a way she hadn’t felt since the throne room, and the reality of the whole situation send her fingers fumbling like they hadn’t since she was a much younger adult on Jakku.

 

There’s a ripple across their bond as Ben presses one knee into the mattress, tears his eyes back up to her face as he reverentially whispers,

 

“May I?” Rey eagerly nods, fights to hold back a breathy whine when Ben slides one gloved finger into her, sees entire galaxies when he begins to move in time with her steadily increasing pace. Ben exhales shakily, dips his head to press a kiss against her knee, and continues to drive the pace until her hands fly to fist the sheets as she arches her back. She comes down slowly, half aware of the man still settled between her legs, blinks down at him blearily before patting the mattress beside her (wholly ready to curl up beside his steady warmth). The second-to-last Skywalker grants her a pink eared smile and obliges.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Rey and Kylo telling Leia, Rey is pregnant. Leia had no clue about Rey and Kylo and the Force Bond sex that lead to this.

They tell Leia a month after Ben’s defection, on a morning cool and clear in the way only spring on Nakadia could be. Something in the Force hums low, hot against Ben’s amygdala as he inhales shakily, struggles to process the feeling that he’s righting some great wrong with the admission. His mother is a creature of habit, always taking her caf alone in the mornings to keep a silent vigil among the soft sounds of early morning on the agricultural planet, today is no different (yet).  


Her shoulders look smaller than he remembers, hunched inwards over the cup of caf in her aging hands, not yet schooled into the sharp lines of the Princess-turned-General, just Leia. She looks every inch the aging Queen, even in her flight suit and no-nonsense hair, looking out over a kingdom of X-Wings and B/SF-17s. In contrast to his barely contained frenetic energy, Rey is almost eerily calm, soldiering across the open-air flight deck with his hand in hers and no worry for the cosmic Force that seems so concerned over the life in her abdomen.

 

“General,” she calls when the distance between them has dwindled to a few paces, “Ben and I’d like to talk to you.” Ben clutches a little more desperately at her hand, anxiety spiking between his third and fourth ribs before Rey strokes at the bond between them, warm and soft as the smell of Naboo’s lake country in his nose.

 

His mother turns to face them, sets still steaming caf down on the railing, and gestures that they join her. Rey’s fingers brush against the pulse in his wrist when they pull away, and Ben finds himself compensating for the loss of contact by curling one protective arm around her middle when she leans against the durasteel beside his mother.

 

“Well,” Leia rasps, and not for the first time Ben wonders when her voice had started to give away her age, “go on then.” Rey pauses, looks back at him, aware suddenly of just how _much_ exactly they were overdue to tell the General.

 

Ben glances between his mother and the woman in his arms, briefly wonders what his father would do in this situation (before realizing that was probably the worst course of action possible), and after a handful of tense seconds decides to just pull the proverbial trigger.  
  
“She’s pregnant,” he blurts, earning a laugh from Rey and all but a gasp from his mother.

 

“She’s _what?”_ Leia clarifies, caf completely forgotten in light of her son’s announcement.

 

“Pregnant?” Ben tries again, rolls the word around in his mouth and wonders if maybe he should have told his mother that he loves her, first.

 

General Leia Organa-Solo, leader of the Resistance and Queen to a dead planet looks like she might be about to kill him. That is, until Rey disentangles herself from where his arms had gone tight with almost-panic and closes the distance between them to reach for Leia’s hand.

 

“They’re still small,” Ben catches her whisper, feels the wind knocked out of his lungs when Rey presses his mother’s hand to her abdomen, “but they’re there.” Leia inhales slowly, lips pressed together in an emotion Ben cannot place, tears starting to fall as Rey leans forward to press her forehead against the General’s.

 

“We wanted you to be the first to know.”


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you asked for smut, and who the hell am i to deny????

Rey has quickly learned that Ben Solo has very specific tastes: he loves the kind of quiet that settles over their chambers late into the light cycle, the smell of rocket fuel, and how her legs look peeking out from underneath the too-long hem of his tunics. She’s not sure though, that he loves anything more than the way she looks splayed out across his throne, head tilted to press against the unforgiving back as he holds her legs open.

 

Yes, Ben has _very_ specific tastes, and Rey’s beginning to get the feeling that she might be his favorite.

 

She’s not expected a lot of the things that’ve transpired in the _Supremacy_ ’s throne room since meeting Ben Solo; never expected to watch the flick of his fingers igniting the saber that dethroned Snoke, to fight back to back with him mere seconds after killing his master, and _certainly_ never expected to have his mouth hot against her cunt atop the dais. Ben growls into her, stills the compulsive roll of frantic hips with one gloved hand against her skin, peering hotly up through damp bangs at her. _Hold still,_ his voice is raw even through the bond, eliciting a whine from deep within her chest. But she complies, knuckles white against the too-large armrests, and somewhere in the back of her head, Rey can tell that Ben is storing every detail of this away for later use.

 

“Please,” she grinds out, hip flexors trembling with the effort of remaining still, fluttering needily on either side of the Supreme Leader’s head. Her lover pauses, tongue pressed flat against her clit before doing exactly the opposite of her half formed plea.

 

“Please _what_?” Ben grins, hand at her hip ghosting down to brush against the erection that tents the front of his pants. Panting, Rey clenches her teeth and tries to roll her hips again, earns a hard press of Ben’s thumb into the soft skin behind her hipbone. “Words, Rey.” Her name is honey on his tongue, sweet against the tang she can taste through the bond and she wants to _scream._

 

“Ben,” is all she manages, a gasping admission that has the hand on his cock darting up to join it’s mate on her hips. In the next second he’s switched their places, settled down upon the throne with her firmly in his lap, pupils blown wide as he deftly undoes the front of his pants.

 

“Yes?” He almost purrs, strokes his cock twice as she watches with wide eyes; Rey doesn’t reply, just bites her lips and draws up onto her knees to hover above him. His free hand returns to her hips, guides them down until she’s brushing against the head, incredibly hot and so fucking _close_ she could cry. “You know what to do,” he murmurs, eyes downcast to watch hungrily as she sinks down onto his length.

 

As soon as she’s down to the hilt, Rey’s head falls forward onto his shoulder, breath fanning out across the thickly woven fabric there as Ben threads a hand through her hair. _Good_ he pushes across the bond even as his lips part in a groan beside her ear, there’s a moment of stillness; of his fingers against her scalp when Rey draws her hips up, savoring the pull, before crashing them down. The hand not in her hair flies to clench against the armrest to his right, and suddenly Ben’s end of the bond becomes a blur of profanity and _more_ that hits against her skull like blaster fire. Rey cannot help but to comply, and soon they’re setting a blinding rhythm together, filling the cavernous room with nothing more than the mingled sounds of heavy breathing and sex.

 

Rey comes first, sinks her teeth into his shoulder when she does to keep from shouting his name, and Ben follows not long after with a filthy moan. Gloved fingers come up to stroke her neck, trace down the ridge of her spine as they both catch their breath, and soon Ben is showering kisses across her neck.

 

“You’re incredible,” he mumbles into her hair, bumps the bridge of his nose against her temple when she pulls back to hazily kiss him. “I love you so much.” Rey just smiles, lets him gather her up into his arms like all those months ago on Takodana, and worms her fingers beneath the neckline of his tunic by way of response. _I know_.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've been slacking on updating this, but brace yourselves for a veritable tsunami of smutty ficlets from tumblr (i'm not sorry at _all_ ).
> 
> for the prompt: "someone's going to hear you"

Rey carries Jakku with her in a myriad of ways, it’s in the sand that still lingers beneath her fingernails, in the rise and fall of her ribs visible even through her tunics, the way she collects wiring and engine components tossed aside by the other mechanics. Like a shadow stretching long over dirty durasteel floors, Jakku follows Rey across the galaxy. She had used to think that Jakku was also with her in the press of her lips, how she bit back any sound that might slip past, moving through the shadowy halls of Resistance bases like some barely corporeal being; an illusion that had been neatly shattered when Ben Solo had come tearing into her life, smelling of rocket fuel and Chandrilan tea.

 

Now, with his lips hot on the peak of one rosy breast and gloved fingers tracing fire into the skin between her hip and thigh, Rey struggles to keep her lips closed around the moans that threaten to spill out. She’s sure Ben can feel it, basks in the thrill of pride that lances across the bond when her head snaps back with a gasp at the dip of his fingers beneath her waistband. There’s no way in hell that _this_ was what they were supposed to be using their bond for; stealing fervent moments in maintenance closets or the cockpit of his Silencer (but when he presses one finger into her cunt, Rey cannot bring herself to care).

 

“ _Ben._ ” She sighs, lips blissfully parted and Jakku long forgotten as Rey begins to rock her hips against the Supreme Leader’s hand. Ginning, Ben presses closer until her view is obstructed entirely by the heavy fabric of his tunic and what little pale ( _pale pale pale_ ) skin peeks out from above his collar.

 

“You’ve got to be quiet, Sweetheart.” He purrs even as he adds another finger, eyes heavy as he leans in just close enough to murmur against her ear. “Someone’s going to hear you.”

 

Panting, Rey tangles her fingers into the wild curl of his hair and presses a plea across their bond ( _Ben’s cock, slick and hard inside of her where she’s pressed against the dirty durasteel paneling of the closet_ ). The groan that rips from his throat sends goosebumps running wildly up her arms, and it’s with a razor sharp grin that Rey turns her head towards his neck to whisper.

 

“You have to be _quiet,_ Ben.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: "are you just going to stare?" + smuggler!ben au (which i fucking love, for the record).

At first, Rey figures Ben would have locked the door, or at least maybe made some move to stop her from crossing the threshold into his room, already gaining momentum on a tirade regarding their latest run. But then, as she stands stock still in the doorframe, pupils dilating in response to the dim light (and not the sight in front of her), Rey realizes that no, he had definitely wanted her to find him, and yes this is why he’d been so smirk-y in the cockpit on their way out of atmo. With that thought sitting low and hot in her stomach she lets her eyes drink in the image of Ben, bare save for the grin on his face, pumping his cock to the sight of her.

“Oh.” Rey whispers, suddenly hyperaware of the way her nipples rub against the rough fabric of her tunic, how the air smells like engine grease and Ben. In response the best smuggler in the galaxy, dauntless pilot of the Millennium Falcon, and prince to a dead planet bites his lip and studies the sweep of her collarbone hotly, brows knitting as his pace picks up. As if transfixed, Rey takes a deliberate step into the room, and closes the door behind her without lifting hazel eyes from the steady up-and-down of her captain-turned-lover’s fist.

He’s beautiful, all tanned skin and constellations of moles against the rumpled fabric of their sheets; and though Rey hasn’t truly known thirst since leaving Jakku for the familiar durasteel of the Falcon and Ben’s arms, her throat is suddenly drier than it had ever been in her AT-AT. Hands still hanging loosely at her sides, Rey takes a few more steps in towards the bed, wonders how he’d react if she dipped her fingers beneath the waistband of her flight pants, or better yet, joined him on the sheets to wrap her lips around his cock. Grunting with the effort of maintaining his frantic rhythm, Ben drops his smirk in favor of a plaintively hot gaze that sends Rey’s breath hitching maybe even more than the words that tumble out of his mouth next.

“Are you just gonna stare?”  

It’s all the invitation Rey needs.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: "the only way you're getting off is on my thigh"

It starts innocently enough: with Rey perched happily in Ben’s lap one night as he scrolls through a file on the integration of more advanced weapons systems into the X-Wing fleet, dark eyes focused on the figures in front of him. Rey has one arm looped lazily around his neck so that her fingers dangle just beneath his collarbone, and the other hand combing through wild curls, drawing soft sighs from Ben’s lips with every other stroke. The former Supreme Leader powers down the datapad, the arm around Rey’s waist tightening as he leans off the side of the bed to set it neatly atop the nightstand.

Once he’s settled back against the wall behind them again Rey curls even closer, slides her lips down the column of his throat to suck a hot mark into the juncture of his neck and shoulder. Ben grins, brings the hand not occupied with the soft skin atop her ribs up, and curls it around one tanned thigh. The contact garners a happy hum from Rey, quickly followed by a nip against Ben’s pulse that hitches his breath in the back of his throat. The hand on her thigh glides higher, edging closer and closer to where the loose tunic she wears ends, sending Rey’s hips bucking eagerly.

“Oh no.” Ben purrs, rolling them both so she’s on her back and he’s hovering above her, braced on one forearm. “Not so fast, Sweetheart.” Rey glowers up at him even as her hair spills across the dark fabric of his pillows, and Ben is struck with just how much he loves her. Dipping his head low, he captures her lips in a searing kiss, tries not to snap his hips up against hers when he opens the bond fully and she responds with a whine against his lips. Rey mumbles his name, tugs on his hair as he presses images of them across the bond; Rey on her knees, mouth hot against the head of his cock, Ben working slowly in and out of her, savoring each bounce of her tits where she lays back against the Supremacy’s lacquered negotiations table.

Continuing the onslaught, Ben carefully readjusts his position so that one leg is placed squarely at the juncture of her thighs, watches hotly as the mattress dips and Rey slides forwards.

“Ben.” She whimpers, pupils blown even more wide open than their bond when she looks at him, cants her hips against his leg and hisses with the friction.

“What do you need, Sweetheart?” Rey’s hips pick up their pace against his leg, desperate in their search for something more. Ben presses a kiss against her throat, increases the pressure of his leg against her clit and slides another scorching image her way ( _Ben on the Supreme Leader’s throne, hand around her throat as she rode him_ ).

“Touch me,” Rey finally gasps, back lifting off the mattress as she rolls her hips onto his leg, “please.” Ben only grins, nips at her jaw before murmuring.

“No.” a whine, “the only way you’re getting off is on my thigh.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: "have you been good?"
> 
> i hope you all have a very sexual monday, since it would appear that i am just dumping kind of a lot of fucking here, cheers _!_

Rey knows, unequivocally, that she is no Jedi. There’s too much frenetic energy in her chest, howling like the winds that tore across the Goazon Badlands, the blood and sand under her fingernails seated too deeply to ever really be washed away. She feels things too strongly, lets the whip and snap of the Force within her guide the motions of her saberstaff in a way no Jedi should. But eclipsing all of those reasons is the burn in her stomach when it comes to one Ben Solo.

It’s unceasing, even months after Ben’s defection to the Resistance, the sight of broad shoulders sends her skittering away down hallways (and unfailingly into his bed every night). She cannot seem to focus whenever he’s near, proximity alarms ringing in her ears louder than they ever have on the Falcon, whipped into a panic by his breath fanning out across her chest and corresponding tide of heat between her thighs. Today Rey thinks she’s finally got a handle on it, figured out how to blink past the desire that clouds her eyes to focus on the task at hand, saberstaff primed over one shoulder as she advances on the former Supreme Leader.

“Yield.” She growls, wholly undistracted for once by the way Ben’s bare chest heaves, eyes heavy as he watches her advance. He smirks, casts his stare up and down her body (unashamed as his stare lingers on the swell of her breasts where they rise above her bindings), and waits until she’s got the hum of her blade at his throat before speaking.

“No.” His eyes look nearly black in the blue light that spills off of twin blades, and Rey falters for half of a second.

“No?” Ben steps in towards her, wraps one large hand around the hilt of the saberstaff (a weapon he’d helped to build, curled around her in the cloistered warmth of their chambers), and levels his lips with her ear to speak.

“Have you been good?” The burning hits her stomach with all the force of a haboob, and Rey hears rather than feels herself whine when he deactivates his saber and brings a hand up to curl around the back of her neck. He’s close enough to feel the heat that radiates off of him, so close that the space between the hilt of his saber hitting the floor and his other hand curling into her hip is almost nonexistent. Rey pants, lets her staff clatter to the durasteel beneath them when Ben takes a purposeful step back towards the wall, and the next thing she knows he has her pressed up against the cool paneling to rest against his hips.

“Well?” He’s grinning into her neck, arms braced on the wall so that his hands rest just above her head, fingers twitching just slightly with every roll of her hips against his rapidly hardening cock. Ben’s tongue presses flat against her pulse, drags up to the dip beneath her ear only to be replaced by his lips in an open mouthed kiss when Rey nods, pressing a frantic yes across the bond.

“Good,” Ben rumbles, locking the door behind them with an absent flick of one gloved hand, good. She watches with blown out pupils as he presses even closer still, runs his fingers along the line of her lower lip and nearly growls when she sucks them into her mouth.

“Oh, I’m so glad, sweetheart.”


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhHHHHhhh for the prompt: I DONT CARE WHAT YOU DO BUT GIVE ME ANGST
> 
> so.
> 
> sorry.

She leaves him on Crait with leather clad knees pressed to red salt and the bitter taste of failure heavy on his tongue. Ben Solo (Kylo Ren? He doesn’t know who he is anymore, cannot discern an answer from the wild beat of his heart against fractured ribs) watches the door to his father’s ship slide shut in front of him and wonders if he’s ever heard a silence as loud as this one. It rings in his ears all the way back to the command shuttle, drowning out the crunch of sodium crystals beneath Stormtrooper boots as they trudge back through the evidence of his one-sided battle.

 

As Ben lies back in his bed that night, newly attained title cast to the floor of his chambers along with salt coated clothes, he imagines parsecs and parsecs stretching out between the edge of his bed and Rey. The ringing in his ears has long since given way to silence, and Ben realizes belatedly that this is the first time he’s truly been alone in his head. Letting the absence of noise sink into his bones, he wonders if the distance between them will remain as Crait, all blinding white light and salt on his lips, or if maybe ( _just maybe_ ) something might bloom. Ben dreams of Naboo that night, and as he rises with the light cycle the next morning, the smell of wildflowers and breaking permafrost hangs in his nose.

 

He does not mourn the death of Kylo Ren. Instead, Ben allows the monster to slip away in the private of his chamber, wonders how to reconcile old and new as he sits on his bed and listens to the silence (he does not miss the feeling of Snoke coiled tightly around his brainstem, still cannot help but find the sudden absence wholly jarring). When Rey appears he only stares, imagines small blue flowers native to Naboo springing up from the polished duraglass that gleams between them and waits for her to speak.

 

“Ben.” She whispers after several pregnant seconds have passed, shattering newfound silence with her blaster fire voice. He stares up at her from his place upon the edge of his bed, cannot shake the feeling that this is the closest he’s come to religion in a long, long time (since the sandy steps of Luke’s budding temple so long ago). Rey takes a step closer, the flowers grow a little more corporeal, and Ben doesn’t ( _cannot_ ) fight the urge to lean in towards her. By the time Rey’s feet are slotted in between his own, Ben imagines the whip thin vines of Naboo’s undergrowth latticing over the toes of her dusty boots. The Last Jedi winds her fingers into his hair, tugs until Ben rests his forehead against her stomach, and says nothing as he struggles to breathe for the salt in his lungs.

When the Force bends, snapping taught to pull her away, Ben blinks at the arid duraglass floor and notes the sudden fissure of what’s unmistakably Rey lying along his occipital ridge. 


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: "Leia finding out about Rey and Ben's secret relationship via C3P0."
> 
> which was,,,, so much fun.

As a result of his father’s blood in his veins or a childhood of sneaking around behind his mother’s back (or maybe, more likely, a combination of the two), Ben Solo considers himself rather an expert in flying under the radar. It’s an art he finds himself re-learning upon joining his mother’s ranks, testing the limits of his abilities as he and Rey work on the mismatched collection of X-Wings the Resistance passes off as a fleet. It strikes him one day, as he hands the Last Jedi a roll of insulated wiring, that maybe hiding rescued nexu kits was a slightly less unattainable task than hiding their relationship from an entire Resistance (and more importantly, the woman at its helm).

In hindsight, he realizes that maybe (and this, Ben knows to unequivocally be a result of his Solo lineage) they weren’t as stealthy as they could have been. It’s a fact burned into the skin over his hipbone as Rey sucks a mark into it, fingers fire at his waistband as they press back into one the  _ Falcon’s  _ alcoves.  _ No,  _ Ben thinks as he fails to stifle a groan in response to the heat of her mouth, they weren’t proceeding with proper attention to staying unnoticed.

Ben’s working on the TIE-Silencer when it happens, alone one moment save for the steady drum of blood in his ears for company, and the next nearly blinded by Rey’s sunshine smile and the smell of fresh caf.

“Hey there, Captain Solo.” She grins, dropping into a crouch to wriggle beneath the ship beside him, seaming caf held carefully in one calloused hand. Wholly uninterested in the converters strung out in front of him with Rey so close, Ben opens his arm in invitation, doesn’t bother to hide his smile when Rey nearly spills the entire cup of (already forgotten) caf in her haste to scramble into his arms.

“You’re up late, sweetheart.” Rey laughs and tucks her nose against his neck, only shrugs one shoulder in response as she folds her legs to properly curl into his lap. For a moment they simply enjoy the silence, let the minutes stretch out behind them while Ben cards his fingers through Rey’s hair. The hangar is silent around them save for the occasional whirr of a BB unit on the move, and Ben feels his shoulders relax incrementally as Rey begins to dust kisses along the line of his jaw.

After a few moments (he loses track of exactly how many, unable to properly focus on the passing of time with long eyelashes fluttering against his skin) Rey’s breathing begins to slow, going warm and deep where it chuffs against his throat. Ben takes one look at the woman sleeping in his arms and decides that he can finish working on the sublight converters in the morning.

He’s halfway to the hangar doors when the familiar sound of mechanical footsteps register, approaching from the corridor that leads back into the base proper. Eyes narrowed Ben casts a glance at Rey, realizes he can’t possibly wake her, and steels himself for whatever droid might round the corner to catch him with both arms full of sleeping Jedi.

“Master Ben!” C3PO exclaims nearly the second he enters the hallway in earnest, modulator ringing falsely in the otherwise silent bay. Ben groans, adjusts Rey so that her face is tucked more firmly against his shoulder, and wonders if he could  _ possibly  _ persuade the droid to keep his mouth shut (he’s sure the odds are bad).

“3PO.” Rey sighs a little in her sleep, reaches one hand up to fist into the fabric of his shirt, and Ben wants nothing more than to make a mad dash past the protocol droid and into the safety of his (their?) bed.

“I didn’t know you and Mistress Rey were engaged in romantic relations!” Mismatched arms come up in what Ben thinks is  _ supposed _ to be a congratulatory gesture (it’s definitely time to recalibrate the social sensors, he notes for later), and for a moment he considers denying it, before realizing that the droid wouldn’t believe him anyway. So Ben reaches out with the Force and freezes his grandfather’s droid in place, ignores tinny protests as he saunters down the corridor, and doesn’t let go until he and Rey are safely in the half-light of their unofficially shared bunk.

The next morning he wakes to Rey softly snoring from beneath one of his pillows, legs tangled hopelessly with his own beneath the sheets, and the incessant beeping of his comm. Even before Ben’s brought the little device up to his eyes he knows who it’s going to be, and so it’s with no surprise that he scans the message from his mother’s private channel:

_ I always did think Naboo in the spring would make a great location for a wedding. _

 


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my light, my life reysxrose asked for "Choke me. Gimme some mild dom!ben too there’s so much dom rey I need dom Ben" and i simply could not say no. *sips from casual sex friday coffee mug*
> 
> also: eternal thanks and love to my better half (reygrets) for looking over the pieces i get nervous about. i wouldn't have posted half of these w/o maddy.

The sight of Ben Solo, standing tall and heavily robed in the thick, dark layers of Supreme Leader is enough to make Rey’s mouth go dry every time the Force snaps their realities atop one another. She’s just stepped out of the fresher, skin still dewy from the not-quite-water when it happens, the sudden sight of Ben is enough to send her heart furiously hammering against the flat of her sternum. Even as Rey clutches the thin, standard issue towel to her chest she wonders what he’s doing, if Ben stands at the head of a negotiations table, hands clasped behind his back and eyes roving the column of her throat as some dignitary or another spews trite military facts.

Rey hopes she’s interrupting- a possessive kind of hope thrilling in her chest at the thought, hopes that when his hand rises, gloved and shining in the hard light of her ‘fresher that he’s dismissing the whole room; bringing the First Order to a grinding stop just for her and the flimsy towel wrapped around her ribs. Ben doesn’t say anything, just gestures in front of him to someone undoubtedly cowering against the  _ Supremacy’s  _ polished duraglass floor and watches her swallow in silence (he’s thinking so loudly she can  _ see  _ it: the shine of her hair as he fists it, guiding her mouth up and down the length of his cock with a speed that’s nearly punishing). The Supreme Leader closes the distance between them, robes fluttering across nearly civilian grade durasteel as he brings one gloved hand up to caress the column of her throat.

“Rey.” Her name falls from his lips like a prayer, painfully soft against her ‘fresher walls. The Last Jedi bites her lips, steps into his hand and doesn’t flinch when he applies the barest amount of pressure. Ben smiles, increases the pressure of his hand against her throat as he brings its mate up to cradle her cheek, leather warm and worn from hours spent on the hilt of his saber. He murmurs her name again, dips his head to dust a kiss against her temple, and doesn’t bother to hide his glee when she responds by sucking a finger into her mouth.

“Touch me.” Rey begs, pupils blown wide when her throat constricts beneath dark leather. Ben doesn’t respond, only walks her back until her shoulder blades press against the condensation that gathers atop the duraglass of her fresher door. She inhales shakily, brings one wet hand up to curl around his wrist, and whines around the finger in her mouth when his erection presses into her thigh.

“Touch me.” She tries again, punctuates the statement with a roll of her hips that much to Ben’s pleasure sends her towel tumbling to the floor. He listens this time, puls his fingers from her mouth to drag them down her abdomen, stopping only momentarily to hover at the top of her slit.

“Touch you?” Ben almost growls, pressing impossibly close against her flushed skin. Nodding, Rey bites her lip when he obliges, one gloved finger dipping inside of her without preamble or ceremony. The hand around her throat tightens, sending her breath high and fast into her chest, and Rey  _ keens  _ when he adds another finger.

“Good.” He purrs, curls his fingers once to stroke the front of her before pulling them out entirely, hand against her throat unmoving as he deftly undoes his pants and gives a few swift strokes of his cock.

“So good.” Rey thinks she might be about to pass out for want of him, wholly unable to hold back her desperate whimpers when he presses inside with torturous precision. The Supreme Leader muffles a sigh against her hair when he’s fully seated, presses his lips against her own in a desperate kiss when he pulls nearly all the way out, and gives no warning before snapping back in. It takes five strokes, one nip against his lower lip, and a pulse of his fingers against her throat, but soon they’ve established a rhythm that has Rey’s toes curling and the frame of her ‘fresher door rattling with each roll of Ben’s hips into hers.

She won’t last long, not with his hand around her throat the way it is; and Rey can tell from the way his thoughts have started to blur together at the edges of their bond that Ben isn’t far behind. So it’s with plainly broadcasted intent that Rey lifts her fingers to her mouth and sucks once (revels in the way Ben’s entire body reacts to the motion) before sliding them down to circle her clit. Rey gets exactly three rotations of her fingers in before she’s crumbling under the heat of Ben’s stare and the unforgiving tide of his thrusts.

“Good girl.” He gasps as he gives one last, erratic thrust and crumples against her, quick to press a reverent kiss into the damp hair at her temple. Rey grins, brings both hands up to card through his hair, and relishes the puff of his breath against the juncture of her neck and throat.

 


	28. Chapter 28

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bc brit asked for "heavy force petting" and i couldn't stop laughing at my own "hey snoke smell my fingers" joke.

Ben thinks the thing he misses the most in the cool, white knuckled grip of deep space is smell. The  _ Supremacy  _ is all but void of it, carrying no scents on the filtered air save for the tang of oxygen burning when he ignites his saber in the training room each morning. He hates it, wishes for the slick smell of engine grease, or the familiar sting of soldered wiring in his nose,  _ anything  _ other than the stale almost-smell of recycled air.

Every time the Force deigns to snap Rey into his reality, Ben’s nearly overwhelmed with the  _ smell  _ of her. It hangs in his nose long after she leaves, distracts him through the day and makes him only resent the parsecs between them more. It’s particularly bad when she’s been training and her chest shines with moisture, sending Ben’s imagination to that same sheen of sweat gathering in the dip at the base of her spine (he wonders how it would feel to drag his fingers through damp brunette hair).  

But instead as he sweeps out of his fresher and into the adjoining bedroom, already dreading his impending meeting with Zabrak dignitaries, Ben smells only the faintest hint of iron on the recycled air. That is, until he casts a glance over at his unmade bed, and is struck with the sight of Rey sitting cross legged atop dark sheets. There’s a breathless moment where they blink, Ben’s heart stuttering as he takes in her state of undress; nothing but her sleep tunic and the wrapping she’s got halfway up her left arm ( _ different light cycles _ , he notes). Rey exhales, smiles up at him sleepily, and Ben can  _ swear  _ he smells the shampoo in her hair.

“G’morning.” Her voice is rough, still thick with sleep, and it sends a jolt down Ben’s spine and right into his lower abdomen. The Supreme Leader lets the cloak he’d been about to fasten flutter to the polished duraglass, already on the mattress beside Rey by the time it’s fully settled against the floor.

“Morning, sweetheart.” Ben nearly purrs, ghosting his nose along the line of her jaw (savors the smell of engine grease and hardy little flowers that spring up between the cracks of old hangar floors on temperate worlds). Rey sighs as she melts into him, head resting against his shoulder and arm wrappings wholly forgotten as he gathers her into his lap. The Force sings around them, reverberating off the  _ Supremacy’s  _ indifferent paneling and filling his room with a warmth completely unbefitting of deep space.

Rey’s legs tangle with his own, tanned upper thighs peeking out from beneath the hem of her tunic as it rides up, and Ben feels his throat go direr than any desert world. Almost as if magnetically drawn Ben’s fingers skim across the tops, and the fluttering sigh he earns in response is the sweetest sound he’s ever heard. Her weight shifts, hips rocking back as gloved fingers near where the thin fabric dips between her legs, and it’s with wide eyes that Rey looks up at him.

“Ben.” She exhales his name in something dangerously close to a prayer (breath soft and sweet smelling where it fans across his chin). He only smiles, ducks his head to press a kiss into the hair at her temple, and inhales sharply when she presses her hips back again. His cock is already half hard against her, spurred on by the rise and fall of pert breasts underneath cream colored fabric, and it takes every ounce of will in his body not to rut against her like a teenager left alone with his thoughts. Instead he lets Rey set the pace, fingers splayed across the skin of her inner thigh as she rocks against him. But Ben Solo’s never been a patient man, and so it’s only a matter of seconds until he’s dipping past the hem of her tunic to draw a lazy line up the slit of her cunt, lips parting in something that’s either awe or hunger as he watches. Rey whimpers, presses into his touch eagerly, and loses pace altogether for a few brilliant seconds as his fingers begin to swirl against her clit.

“Good?” He asks, unable to hold back his smirk when Rey shivers at his breath against her ear. The hum of affirmation she gives him is reedy in a way he knows to mean that  _ yes  _ it really  _ is _ good, a sentiment neatly punctuated by the grind of her ass back against his painfully erect cock. Ben groans, a low, filthy thing that snaps their bond to full attention, bridging what little space had stretched between minds entirely.

“Please.” Rey gasps, caught between the steady rhythm of leather clad fingers against her clit and the press of his cock against her ass. All but pulling his hand away, Ben falls still save for the wild pulse high in his throat.

“Please  _ what?”  _ Almost as soon as the question has left his mouth Rey presses and image of his fingers sinking into her across the bond, hip flexors fluttering on either side of his hand as they both gasp.

“Ah.” He dumbly replies before doing as she’d asked.

He’s got two fingers in and a torturously slow pace established when Rey brings her fingers up to her lips, and Ben cannot even begin to modulate the slough of profanities that spill off his lips when she gives them a suck before beginning to rub herself in tandem to his thrusts. She whimpers, lips forming his name even as her voice fails completely and the walls of her cunt clench wildly against his fingers.

“I-” She’s grinding back against him again, and Ben struggles not to lose himself to the friction (he won’t have time to change his pants before the meeting). “B-“ A hiccupping gasp as he nips at her neck, and then Rey’s falling apart on his fingers.

Rey lies boneless in his bed afterwards, watching with hazy eyes and left arm still half wrapped as he goes about getting ready to leave. He wants nothing more than to comm Hux and cancel their meeting with the Zabraks, to spend as much time as the Force will allow with the woman who dozes against his pillows. But there are futures left to win, and so instead Ben presses a fall of kisses across her cheeks and throat, murmurs his love into her hair just before he stands.

Deep space is still cold, and only growing more so as the distance between him and Rey’s happily flickering Force signature increases. But as the doors to the conference room slide open and Ben raises his hand in greeting to the visiting dignitaries it’s impossible to miss the smell of Rey on his fingers, and suddenly he’s almost wishing for the oppressive cold again.

 


	29. Chapter 29

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: remember Kylo Ren holding Rey unconscious in TFA? Yeah, that. That's your prompt. Only Ben has defected and it's post TLJ.

Being back on the _Millennium Falcon_ has brought several things to the forefront of Ben’s attention:

 

One: that he really _has_ grown a great deal since he last padded the halls of his father’s beloved ship.

 

Two: that Rey’s a much better mechanic than Han had ever bothered to be, a fact written all over the internal wiring of the ship, tidier than he’s ever seen it before.

 

And, three: that he’ll never get tired of sharing the cockpit with her.

 

_Even_ when they’re so deep into the constant blue glow of hyperspace that circadian rhythms are abandoned all together and Rey’s soft snores fill the cabin somewhere around 3 in the light cycle. Ben stands beside the co-pilot’s chair where she’s sprawled, struggles to catch his breath as he ponders the fact that she chose him (reached down past the ruins of Kylo Ren to pluck him from the ashes with a precision honed beneath blistering Jakku sun). His desert girl shifts, brow furrowing at some subconscious offense, and Ben can only imagine the crick developing in her neck from the angle she’s bent it at to rest against the seat back.

 

Still smiling fondly Ben drops into an almost-crouch, reaches one calloused hand out to tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear before gathering Rey up into his arms. Han’s sabacc dice clink softly from the head of the cockpit, the only motion outside of the stream of stars above them, and Ben wonders what his father would think if he could see him now. It’s seems like millennia have passed since his father padded this same route through the ship, a much smaller Ben plucked from the co-pilot’s chair cradled against his chest.

 

Rey’s lips part in a half awake protest when he lowers the two of them onto the (unmade) bed, awkwardly maneuvering his legs underneath the covers. _Ben_ she presses across the bond, more asleep than awake even as her fingers fist in the fabric of his loose shirt.

 

“I’m here, Sweetheart,” he mumbles, one hand darting up to cup the back of her skull as he leans forward to tug the blankets up and over their already tangled legs. The sigh he earns in response is sweeter than the breezes of any garden world as it luffs against his throat, warm and soft like the edges of Rey’s Force signature where they lap against his own.

 

Ben had used to think that maybe this ship was haunted, but now (with Rey so close to him) he knows there are no devils here.


	30. Chapter 30

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: numb
> 
> ps: sorry updates have been so ~sporadic~, i am,,,,, drowning under work and school (but the end is so near!!).

Ben hasn’t felt anything since Crait. No longer registers the weave of dark fabric against his shoulders or the burn that used to settle into his muscles after particularly punishing training sessions. It seems almost as if he’s left all sensation scattered across blunt sodium crystals, exchanged functioning nerve endings for the sound of his boots against durasteel paneling. Even his head is silent, void of all noise where it once had been filled with whispers ( _not enough, never enough, come to me young Solo_ ), and then sunshine ( _Ben_ ).

 

He hates it, rails against the sudden sterilization of his environment with all the force of a caged Rancor. The First Order continues to advance around him, moving almost as if Snoke had never quite died, as if the wayward son of Leia Organa had never taken his throne. He wakes every morning with the beginning of the light cycle, trains alone save for the combat droids until his muscles shake for lack of sodium, and his head swims with the smell of Rey’s hair. When he stands at the front of the flight deck, gaze cast out over the sweeping windows and the desolate expanse of deep space beyond them, Ben imagines it welcoming him with open arms. Deep space would be a fitting grave, he thinks, cold enough to make even _him_ feel something.

 

Five lunar cycles pass in this way before Ben registers even the barest hint of sensation. He’s striding down the core of the _Supremacy,_ boots beating a casket rhythm into the duraglass flooring as he nears the elevator he’d once so dreaded riding ( _tries, and fails, not to think about the way Rey’s eyes had reflected the lights as she looked up at him, hopeful and golden in the too-white light_ ). As if on cue the Force ripples, a feeling low in his stomach like dropping out of hyperspace, and suddenly Rey stands opposite him. She’s paler than the last time he’d seen her, skin slowly adjusting to a life spent in deep space and away from Jakku’s violent sun. The Supreme Leader freezes, overwhelmed with the sudden thunder of his heart against his sternum and the heat that rushes almost painfully into his fingertips.

 

“Ben.” His name is little more than a breath on her lips, dying nearly as soon as it falls against the polished floor panels beneath them. “You look exhausted.”

 

He blinks, aware of the almost-bruises that bloom across his eyes and the shadow that seems permanently set beneath his cheekbones. Rey licks her lips, takes a step closer, and it’s almost as if she’d never left him on the floor of the throne room when she brings one hand up to cup his cheek.

 

“ _Ben._ ” She murmurs again, this time with enough force for her breath to lap at his chin like the tides on Ahch-to. Rey brings her other hand up, and Ben cannot help but melt into the touch, surrendering himself fully to the most sensation he’s felt in the last six lunar cycles.

 

The _Supremacy_ hums around them, traversing parsecs like a flawlessly engineered funeral procession of one, and Rey rises up onto her toes to dust a kiss across Ben’s forehead. When she’s back onto the flat of her foot Ben forces his eyes to open, focuses blearily on her face as small hands begin to pull away from his cheeks.

 

“Come back to me.” Rey begs, fingertips brushing the roughly woven fabric at her hips. Cold prickles at the tips of Ben’s fingertips again, numbness already creeping back up through his veins. He swallows thickly, rushes to formulate his next move before he loses all sense of motor function to the splintering cold of deep space.

 

“I-“ Ben falters, closes his eyes for a second ( _still sees her face, hopeful and bright enough to burn his retinas_ ). “Rey, you know-“ But before he can try to articulate how he’s realized he cannot fathom a future that does not end with him at her side, and how he does not have the means to make that happen unless he is _here_ , Rey tugs one hand into the space between them, and presses something warm into his palm.

 

“I know.” She whispers, close enough for Ben to count the freckles that lay across her nose and cheeks ( _thirty nine, maybe forty three_ ), and it’s with a start that he realizes he’d pressed his nearly panicked thoughts across the bond.

 

Rey leaves him standing in a Dreadnaught-turned-coffin, fingers still burning with her phantom touch, and his mother’s tracking beacon clutched in his too-large palm.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a short little something for your saturday !  
> (hope everyone is having a vvv relaxing weekend)

“What do you see when you look at the stars?”

Rey asks with no preamble or warning one bitterly cold morning planetside on Hoth, voice muffled by the thick fabric of the outer layer she’s tugged over her nose and mouth. Pausing to turn his gaze towards the still dark sky, Ben lets out a long breath that freezes on his eyelashes and studies the constellations winking indifferently down at them.

“I see-“ He begins slowly, and the sound of sabacc dice in an empty cockpit replaces the crunch of snow beneath his boots when they draw to a halt.

“I see the expectations of others, things I am supposed to be.” Rey’s silent beside him, the ends of her hair white with frost where they curl around her face (Ben thinks he’d be breathless with the sight of her even if they weren’t trudging gradually uphill across the tundra). One thickly gloved hand comes up to tug the edge of her collar down enough to speak, and Rey blinks up at him thoughtfully.

“You see a prison.”

Ben draws his shoulders towards his ears against the breeze that springs up, howling across tundra to bite at his already windburnt cheeks unforgivingly. He supposes she’s right, casts his stare back up to the navy sky almost as if to search for durasteel bars latticing across the slowly lightening expanse (tries, and fails to find words with which to better explain the weight in his chest). Before he can draw too far into his bones Rey slips her fingers into his own, tugs just enough to prompt him back into motion as they continue up towards the Silencer.

“I don’t see a prison.” Rey offers over her shoulder when they reach the ship, gloved fingers pulling from his to coax a thick layer of frost off of the cockpit’s exterior control panel. Hoth might be bitterly cold but Ben find himself fighting a wave of heat when Rey deftly keys his personal code into the ship, only to surrender himself to the sensation entirely when she scrambles into the cockpit and beckons for him to follow.

_Maybe_ , he thinks as the engines hum to life and Rey begins to prep the craft for takeoff, wonder in her eyes even as she punches familiar sequences into the TIE Silencer’s dash, _maybe he can learn to see the stars as she does._

 


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for a very sweet anon who wanted more in the same universe as _[gradients](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13747551/chapters/31589838)_. Which you don't actually need to read to enjoy this little vignette, but would definitely enrich the experience.

Varykino is just as beautiful as Ben had remembered it to be from his childhood. The sun on Naboo is gentle, warm in a way that doesn’t quite reach his bones, but still bleeds warmth into skin so accustomed to the sterile cold of deep space. Rey seems to come alive the second they step off of the shuttle, eyes wide and wondrous as she reaches for Ben’s hand before tearing off across the gently sloping grass towards the shore. He follows, equal parts unable and uninterested in resisting, and cannot help but think of the blustery rains of Ahch-to ( _her smile had been just as brilliant then, lighting up the entire planet as she’d marveled at the rain on her fingertips_ ).

 

“You grew up here?” She asks, one lean arm coming up to loop around his shoulder for support as she struggles to take her boots off. Ben grins and curls his fingers into the crook of her elbow before responding.

 

“Mostly just the summers.” His desert girl nods, presses her newly bare foot into the sand with a surge of glee that sings across the bond, and quickly sets about freeing the other.

 

When she’s got both feet bare and all ten toes buried into sand that’s maybe more lake water than sediment, Rey closes the distance between them in a kiss that sends Ben’s heart stuttering poorly in his chest. He doesn’t care that his mother’s transport will be landing any moment now, that in just a few, short hours they’re going to be swept up in the hurricane that’s Leia Organa on a mission. No, the only thing Ben particularly cares about is that Rey’s laughing in his arms, and the sudden dryness of his throat when she drops to her knees to unlace his boots ( _her eyes are nearly luminous in the half light of his chambers, peering up at him hotly from the durasteel paneling, and Ben doesn’t know how he ever thought he could do anything but love her_ ).

 

By the time Leia’s sweeping down the docking ramp of her cruiser, what seems like half of the resistance in tow, Rey and Ben are calf deep and grinning in sunny water. The Princess-turned-General pauses, hand on her chest as she watches her son bend to press a kiss against Rey’s temple, and cannot shake the feeling that some horrible wound in the Force has been healed.

 

“Mother.” He gasps upon spotting her, stare exactly as disarmingly canny as it had been when he was a child. Rey stills in his arms and Ben doesn’t need to look down at her to know she’s blushing, face alight with the golden lines that lattice up and off the water to dance across her faintly pink cheeks.

 

“It’s bad luck to see your bride before the wedding.” Is all Leia quips, already crossing the lawn on some unspoken nuptial mission.

 

Ben flounders for words, and it’s not until Leia and her entourage are halfway up the first set of steps that his capacity for speech returns. Rey presses an open mouthed kiss against his chest, tightens the twine of her arms around his waist, and shakes her head.

 

“Not for us though.”

 

Ben doesn’t think he’s ever felt so light.

 

“No, not for us, Sweetheart.”


	33. Chapter 33

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: What if Luke never showed up at the hut? what would have happened between Rey and Ben?
> 
> ps. sorry i've been so bad about answering replies, i really will get to it i pROMISE.

For having grown up under the violent beat of Jakku’s sun, Rey has never before felt thirst like she does when Ben Solo reaches out across the parsecs and parsecs between them to curl his fingers into hers. She’s lost count of all the nights spent alone studying the rivets holding together her AT-AT, imagining conversations with idyllic parents and hoping for someone, _anyone_ to share in the silence with. Loneliness burns in the back of her throat like desert air after several days without water, hot and dry in a way she’s somehow sure only the man across from her can quench. The second their fingers touch the Force practically _sings,_ swelling around them like Ahch-to’s highest tide to crash at Rey’s feet when Kylo ( _Ben,_ she thinks upon studying the way wide eyes trace the bow of her lip) speaks.

 

“Rey.” The single syllable carries all the weight of the Lanai hymns that fall against early morning mist; and as Ben’s fingers skate up to hover over the pulse in her wrist, Rey leans even closer ( _closer closer closer_ ). He brings his hand up to his mouth slowly, uses sharp teeth to pull the leather away all while hotly holding her stare, and almost before she knows it he’s tracing the line of one cheekbone reverently.

 

She can’t pinpoint when exactly he moves to kneel in front of her, but it seems like one second he’s sliding his fingers into the hair at her temple, and the next he’s staring up at her like maybe she’d reached up and plucked the stars from the sky. _Rey_ , his voice hits against her occipital ridge like blaster fire, and she cannot help the gasp that pulls in past her teeth in response. Outside the wind rails at the hut, sending rain lashing against the thin durasteel door and filling the small space with the smell of sea and air in motion.

 

It’s fitting Rey muses as Ben’s lips brush tentatively against her own, dry and chapped from the relentlessly filtered air of deep space, that the weather is as wild as the energy that tears across their bond. They’re two individuals so comprised of brute force and the way skin splits under duress that Rey doesn’t think it could possibly be any other way. She wonders, briefly, if maybe they’ve caused the storm in its entirety, but then Ben is kissing her in earnest, fingers in her hair and lips fire where they slant across her mouth, and all rational thought is cast aside along with the blanket at her shoulders.

 

When they pull apart, breathless and trembling Rey runs one calloused finger down the scar ( _her scar_ ) that lances down from Ben’s brow and feels her heart clench poorly as his eyes slide shut. Ben leans into the touch, turns his face until he can press an open mouthed kiss into the palm of her hand, and Rey is ruined.

 

“You saw it too.” He breathes against her skin, eyes still closed even as her other hand comes up to cradle the back of his head.

 

“Yes.”

 

The weight of that admission hangs more heavily than the precipitation in the air between them, present in the shadows that hang beneath Ben’s eyes and the space behind Rey’s sternum. Ben doesn’t open his eyes until the Force bends again, lets her continue in her timid exploration of his head, eyes honey brown in the firelight when they do snap open.

 

“Rey.” His urgency bleeds across the bond, sends her heart racing in anticipation of what he could possibly say next. But then the Force snaps taught, keening when his fingers dart up to curl around her own, and then Ben Solo is gone.

 

The storm abates, leaving Rey alone save for the dim glow of the coal bed and her thoughts as predawn light begins to filter in through the ill-fitting doorframe.


	34. Chapter 34

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Luke catching Rey and Kylo having sexy times instead of hand holding during the hut scene.
> 
> because: apparently today is the day i exclusively write alternate takes on the hand touching scene, who knew.

Rey’s time spent on Jakku has given her an excellent sense of control. She knows how best to regulate her breathing to keep the panic at bay when the bones of old Star Destroyers shift atop the sand. Knows how to regulate her sleep schedule so as to avoid the most extreme temperatures, and how to control the rage that whips more fearsomely than any haboob in her chest when a deal goes wrong. Her control is a force steelier than the staff she wears slung across her back and wielded with much the same precision.  That is, until Ben Solo comes tearing into her world in a rush of filtered air and the impermeable stillness that accompanies deep space.

 

And just like that, Rey is brought face to face with a total lack of control.

 

A lack of control that allows her fingers to brush along the sharp line of Ben’s jaw, tracing a shaking path from chin to ear. Not so shaky though as the breath he exhales, a hot tide of air that hits her wrist with all the force of Jakku’s sun at high noon and sends goosebumps racing up her arms. Rey bites her lip, leans in even closer as the firelight races a flush up Ben’s cheeks, and cannot muster the control necessary to hold back her sigh when his lips find the corner of her mouth.

 

“You’re not alone.” He repeats, reverent against her skin in a way Rey’s only seen in temples and the moments between sunset and the slow march of Jakku’s moon above the dunes.

 

“You’re not alone.” Again, as his hand not curled into her own comes up to weave broad fingers into her hair.

 

And then there are no more words as their lips slot together and the whole planet seems to _sing_ with the rightness of it. Ben tugs her closer still, hums his approval into her open mouth when the blanket falls to the packed dirt beneath them and abandons the tangle of their fingers in favor of twining an arm around her waist. Rey sighs, lets him pull her fully into his arms and thinks that surely she’s never held anything so precious as this when she brings her newly freed hand up to cup his face.

 

The Force is a palpable thing around them, nearly visible in its joy when Ben’s fingers find the small of her back beneath the damp weave of her tunic; even more so when he bows his head to press his lips against the wild hammer of her pulse in her throat. The uneven ground catches at her knees, and some level of discomfort must filter through the bond because the next thing Rey knows Ben has hoisted her into his lap in one fluid motion.

 

“Ben.” She sighs into the hair at his temple, quickly followed by a stuttering inhale when the hand in her hair slides down to slip beneath the collar of her tunic, stealing soft strokes of the top of one small breast. Rey rocks her hips forward, whines when she finds friction against the tent in Ben’s pants, and drops both hands down to the dark fabric in the same second that the Force stills around them.

 

Dark eyes widen, Rey feels her heart stop, and suddenly they’re exposed to the full of Ahch-to’s weather and the wild stare of Luke Skywalker.

 

 


	35. Chapter 35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no one asked for this, and i am not even the littlest bit sorry for it.

Ben wakes to the whirr of droids at work and a darkness so thick he thinks he can feel it in his trachea, pressing heavily against the epithelial tissue that lines his windpipe. There’s a brush of durasteel against the back of his neck, a prick as anesthetic is injected into the base of his skull and it’s with a start that he realizes he’s lying on his stomach, cheek pressed against the roughly woven sheets of what must be a medical cot. The smell of antiseptic hangs high in his nose, mingling with the bitter tang of filtered air to sting when he inhales too deeply in response to the pull of sutures at his skin.

With a groan and a wince at the pain that lances down his neck and into his toes, Ben attempts to push himself into a sitting position, heedless of the upset binary the droid at his back spews. He blinks, runs one hand through unwashed hair and feels his stomach drop straight to the floor when his brain foggily realizes he’s still in the dark. Shoulders creep up towards his ears as Ben inhales slowly (ignores the sting of antiseptic against his mucous membranes) and forces his eyes open only to fight back bile at the void that greets him.

He’s distantly aware of his heart rate increasing, notes the binary alarm of droids responding to rising numbers and elevated cortisol levels but does not act on them (doesn’t think he has the control necessary to calm his breathing). Instead, Ben grips the edge of the cot and heaves himself off of it as he reaches out in the Force, casting desperately for some sense of the room around him. Instead he finds only more darkness, blacker than the cloak he’d used to shroud himself in, and a lancing pain in his shoulder as it connects with what feels like the ventral ridge of a dormant surgical droid.

“Ben.” A voice familiar even in his panicked state, though not enough so to keep him from shoving past the droid in a continued attempt to escape. Disoriented by the clatter of durasteel against indifferent flooring the Supreme Leader whirls towards the sound, heart in his throat as one cool hand comes up to cup his cheek.

“ _ Ben. _ ” Rey repeats, tugging him down until his forehead rests against her neck. There’s a beat of silence where ragged breathing slams against her skin more violently than any orbital autocannon, and the durasteel beneath his feet seems cold enough as to burn. Ben’s not sure if it’s exhaustion, the Force, a sneakily injected sedative or some combination of the three when the tension passes and he sags entirely into Rey’s arms, but he relishes the sudden warmth either way. The last thing he registers before succumbing entirely to the smell of Rey’s skin is her fingers at the nape of his neck, delicately avoiding sutures he couldn’t quite feel anymore.

The second time Ben jerks into consciousness it’s to a set of sheets far softer than the one’s he’d been tangled in before, and the steady rise and fall of Rey’s chest beneath his cheek. He can tell it’s her by the smell of her skin; engine grease and something vaguely floral that makes his throat go tight (it’s not until much later that Ben realizes it’s the Chandrilan tea his mother was so fond of). Using the ridge of her sternum against his cheekbone to ground him, Ben attempts to reach out in the Force; but finds only an absence of feeling and the darkness from before pressing inexorably against the back of his skull.

Pulled into wakefulness beneath him, Rey brings her hand up to bridge the gap between his shoulder blades and presses him tighter to her chest in response to the short, shallow breaths that puff past his lips.

“Hey.” Her voice is barely more than a whisper, hardly enough to stir his hair when she continues. “Ben, breathe.” He does as he’s asked (unable to resist her even now), and Rey rewards him with a kiss against the crown of his head when he relaxes enough to let his ribcage expand fully with each rattling breath.

“Where are we?” Ben listens to her thoughtful inhale, notes the way the hand in his hair stills before she answers.

“Hyperspace, en route to Corellia.” He doesn’t remember boarding a ship, can’t bridge the gap in his memories between the heat of battle and the cold air of the med bay when he’d first careened into consciousness. Rey’s fingers work through his hair, brushing through the tangled strands at the back of his neck in a show of bone deep patience. He doesn’t ask for further elaboration, and Rey chooses to shower kisses across his hair instead of continuing; she seems content to hold him in silence, to draw her hands through dark locks until he falls back asleep, and for a moment Ben lets himself be lost in the comforting hum of sublight engines. That is, until, half asleep and wholly melted against her he reaches for their bond.

“I can’t feel you in the Force.” He chokes out, voice broken even to his own ears. Rey’s fingers clench once against the nape of his neck (dangerously close to still tender sutures) before smoothing out to cradle his head, the contact a pale comparison to the flare of her energy that had spent so long tucked away behind his occipital ridge.

Ben adjusts to blindness slowly, memorizes the confines of his own skull with more detail than he ever had before just as he relearns how to walk. The first few steps are faltering, one hand white knuckled against Rey’s arm, every fiber of his being focused on the even tide of her breath where it echoes against durasteel walls.  

“Good!” She sighs, lips dusting a kiss against his shoulder when his stride begins to loosen.

“ _ Good _ .” Rey breathes against his chest as he presses inside of her, blind to the Force and the incandescence of her skin, but somehow all the more cowed by their coupling for it. He ignores the press of her heels against the small of his back lets his pace linger, takes time to relearn the topography of Rey’s body ( _ maps out the pebbled skin around her nipples and the vast plains of goosebumps his breath sends racing across muscled arms _ ). Rey’s never been a quiet lover, but it seems that now his name spills from her lips with the relentless force of blaster fire, each syllable building upon the one before it until Ben thinks he can taste her pleasure on his lips. A train of thought he capitalizes on the morning, kissing his way down her body to the tune of sleep soft moans until his mouth can close hotly over her clit.

He laps at her gently, savors the smell of her cunt and the way her arousal sits so heavily on his tongue (finds himself struck with how much different the experience was, now that he was so much more aware of his olfactory senses). It’s not long until he’s sliding a finger inside, even less time before Rey’s fingers are weaving through his hair to pull him tighter against her sex.

“Ben.” His name is sweeter than any old Alderaanian dessert on her tongue when she comes, and the former Supreme Leader thinks that he can almost  _ see _ her for the emotion behind it.

It’s become routine for Ben to spend the first few minutes of his mornings reclining against the cool wall of their shared ‘fresher, eyes closed and hands curled into Rey’s hips as she runs a razor along the planes of his face. His desert girl takes her work seriously, and he can perfectly imagine the crease in her brow as she focuses on the stretch of skin between his cheek and jaw bones. As the months have passed, and the damage to his cranial nerve has started to (finally) heal, his connection to the Force has slowly started to blossom again. Rey sets his razor down with a happy sigh, and Ben feels her Force signature spike as she moves to kiss him.

“I love you.” It’s little more than a whisper against her lips, and yet somehow Ben knows she understands just how much weight rests on those three words. Rey slides her palms up into his hair in the same breath that she slips into his lap, flush against him in the deceptively small room.

“I know.” Ben grins, relishes the clarity with which he can feel her in the Force, and thanks every star in the galaxy that he had found his way to her.  

 


	36. Chapter 36

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: They take a shower. Rey is delighted by all the water and plays with it like a little kid. Kylo tries to convince her to let him wash her hair with his fancy conditioner.

The  _ Falcon’s  _ lack of updated technology has been nothing but a pain in Ben’s ass since he’d strolled out of the First Order in the dead of night, Rey’s kiss still burning on his tongue. She’s in excellent shape, running as smoothly as was ever possible for the old Corellian engineering; each component lovingly maintained by sandy fingers. But that’s just the thing, Ben thinks sourly to himself one morning as he stands in the cargo hold, eyes narrowed and caf steaming in one hand as he glares at the hydraulics responsible for the bay doors, there’s only so much they can coax out of her.

There’s one piece of outdated technology though that Ben cannot even begin to bring himself to hate, tucked midway between the commons and crew quarters. The  _ Falcon  _ has an actual, water and steam ‘fresher, just big enough to fit two people and a few toiletries without too much fuss. According to Rey, the left hand lighting filament gave up the ghost about four hours after she’d “acquired” the ship on Jakku, leaving the tiny room perpetually cast in a dim, warm light. It almost makes Ben think of the old romance holos he’d caught fragments of as a child, all barely there light and softly sweeping ingénue smiles.

More than any romance holo the sight before him now snaps Ben all the way back to their first few, fleeting connections before Crait. Rey stands with her side turned to him, lips split into a nearly blinding grin and sudsy hair entirely forgotten as she cups her hands to catch the recycled water that falls from above them. Jakku is written all over Rey, from the abandoned engine pieces she tucks into the pouch on her hip, to the way her arms curve around the plate when she eats; much like the myriad of dents and scrapes that detail the  _ Falcon’s _ (admittedly colorful) history, Rey carries Jakku in her every move. The little ticks always send Ben’s heart stuttering poorly against his ribs, but none more so than this wide eyed worship of water.

Ben tips his chin into the spray to let the steaming water slick his hair back, thinks of old Jedi temples and the way his mother’s perfume had hung on the air when he was little. When he opens his eyes again Rey is still playing in the water, all dewy eyelashes and skin gone pink with the heat. The Force sings around them, mingling with the sound of Rey’s joy and the condensation that drips down transparisteel paneling to hit a bright crescendo when Ben opens his arms in invitation.

“Hey, Sweetheart.”

Rey only responds with a bright peal of laughter and dances away from him, hair plastered across pink cheeks to frame her eyes when she whirls to toss a handful of water in his face. The former Supreme Leader raises one eyebrow with a sharp grin, and Rey has the good grace to look suspicious when he raises a hand (the ‘fresher is so small that the action nearly draws his fingers up the smooth expanse of skin spanning between her hip and clavicle, a fact that presses hotly against Ben’s trachea). Rey jumps when Ben’s conditioner flies past her cheek and into his hand, and he can’t help but chuckle at the indignant breath that puffs past damp lips.

“C’mere.” Wide hazel eyes study his flex of his bicep as he taps the head of the bottle against his hand before flicking it open just enough to dispense a washer sized portion into one large palm. Rey bites her lip, blinks against the water that drips down her brow, and steps into Ben’s arms.

The whole galaxy seems to settle the second Rey’s chest presses against his own, and Ben doesn’t bother to hide his hum of content when slick arms twine around his waist. If it was possible to spend the rest of his life here, in the fresher of his father’s beloved ship with Rey soapy and warm against his chest he knows he would.

 


	37. Chapter 37

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you uhhhh all have brit to thank for this one
> 
> prompt: "kylo ren sometimes jerks off in front of a mirror - not because he's a narcissist but so he can look at his scar running down past his collarbone and think about rey and run his nails across it while knowing in his heart that she owns him" bonus if there's some force bond action / voyeurism

Ben has never considered himself a particularly vain man. Never really had time, admittedly, to preen in front of fresher mirrors; always too busy first building callouses against the hilt of his saber, then running from his past as if the very soles of his feet were on fire. In fact, outside of boyish insecurities never quite outgrown (the way his ears peeked through his hair, how knife edge his stare turned when faced with a challenge) he’d hardly even paused to consider his appearance, _especially_ not so after donning the layered wool robes of his uncles following. No, Ben hadn’t ever let himself slow down long enough to study his reflection in the mirror until one scavenger girl had come whipping through the sterile durasteel halls of the _Finalizer_ like one of the sandstorms Luke had used to spin such tall tales of.

 

It first happened entirely on accident just a few short hours after Starkiller, his visage marred by the weeping red line she’d torn across his face with the tip of his Grandfather’s saber. The chrome of his assigned med droid warped his face, bending the planes of his cheek bones at odd angles, and Ben had balked. After the initial shock had worn off, he swallowed thickly past the anesthetic pressing like cotton in the back of his throat, studied the hazy reflection even closer, and hardly had time to piece together a coherent thought before slipping under the great, calm ocean of unconsciousness.

 

Now though, he’s entirely _too_ conscious of the lurid pink scar that spans from above his brow to just beneath one poorly healed clavicle (broken back when he’d still worn the soft beige of Luke’s robes and smiled at the tickle of a Padawan braid against the pulse in his throat). Stares at it as he stands in front of the mirror, skin still flushed from the ‘fresher, and lungs struggling to properly pull super saturated air into their depths. It’s _hers,_ and belatedly he realizes that he is too, a truth as inescapable as the sodium crystals that still cling to the tread of his boots and dust the landing gears of his upsilon. The thought sends a thrill through his core that lands somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the same somewhere that had come to life when she’d placed her hand in his.

 

If he closes his eyes and focuses, Ben can still feel the catch of her skin against his own. Can still register residual heat in the very tips of his fingers, not yet lost to the sterile cold that comes with deep space. Her hands were calloused ( _like his_ ) worn rough by years of practice with her staff, blistered in new places where the hilt of his Grandfather’s saber wore. He wonders if the rest of her skin is just as weathered, as scarred as his maybe, tangible proof of a life hard lived. Pulse sitting high in his throat, Ben peers down through foggy glass at an _entirely_ different sort of tangible proof and takes a stuttering breath.  

 

He’s hard, to the point that the head of his cock bobs needily against his stomach in the still misty air. Ben swallows thickly, cannot keep his stare from tracing the line of Rey’s scar, and wraps one hand around himself as the other comes down to steady his weight against the counter. The sound of skin on skin fills his tiny ‘fresher, hitting the walls with all the force of a battering ram cannon, and sending a flush all the way up to the tips of Ben’s ears. His hand works steadily, and Ben cannot help it when his thoughts inevitably steer towards the line of puckered tissue that lances down his skin.

 

She’s marked him, picked him out from beneath the mangled durasteel of Kylo Ren with sandy fingers. It’s that thought that tears a gasping moan from his lips, and Ben lets his head fall down when his hand picks up its pace (struggles to breathe when he thinks about those same tiny fingers wrapped around the hilt of his saber). He’s so focused on the image of Rey with her teeth bared and his weapon in her hands that he fails entirely to notice the sudden absence of noise, or the faint _pop_ of his ears when the Force connects them.

 

“Ben.” Her voice, when he registers that it’s _actually_ her voice and not just another layer to his fantasy is surprisingly warm, low in a way he’d never quite heard from her before. His hand falters, and he knows he’s a sight to see, hunched over in front of the mirror with his cock in hand (he _also_ knows their bond is blown wide open, and that the subject of his thoughts is of no secret to her).

 

“Rey-” He starts as if to defend himself, but before his poor brain can begin to formulate a defense through the shame that hangs in front of his eyes, a pair of bare feet appear beside his own. Rey’s fingers are gentle when they land on his chin, tilting his head up just enough for Ben to study the fringe of her eyelashes as she draws one finger down the length of his scar.

 

“Don’t stop on my account.” Rey’s eyes are earnest when the flick up to meet his own, and Ben doesn’t think he’s ever obeyed any command so quickly as that one when his fist surges back to life.

 

She watches the whole thing hungrily, fingers running lightly up and down his scar as Rey wets her lips. Ben leans into the touch, relishes the way she turns her face into the unsteady puff of his breath, and cannot stop the moan that breaks from his throat when Rey experimentally lays blunt fingernails into the edge of his scar. The whimper that rises from her chest to meet it is what ultimately pushes Ben over the edge, forehead pressed against her shoulder as he comes across the countertop.

 

He inhales slowly in the aftermath, takes a quiet second to rub the tip of his nose over the skin beneath her collarbone, and sighs when Rey threads her fingers through his hair. The Force hums in between them contentedly, warmer even than the tide of Rey’s breath against his temple when Ben pulls his head up.

 

“I can explain.” The Supreme Leader begins, even as he struggles to form a coherent thought past the hand in his hair.  Rey smiles, presses a lingering kiss against the corner of his mouth and shakes her head.

 

“You don’t need to.”


	38. Chapter 38

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Could you do Rose supporting Rey when the Resistance find out about her connection with Kylo?
> 
> i had originally intended for this to be a bit longer, but it very clearly wanted to end where it did and i'm not one to force these things. bahaha

In the cold, weary months that follow Crait, Rey finds herself with little more to do than pilot the _Falcon_ and learn. Fingers that still tingle from Ahch-to memorize the _Falcon’s_ control panels switch by switch, and Rey tries not to think about who else may have learned how to pilot on this very ship. As the months pass, she learns that Finn’s smile crinkles his eyes just a little bit more when Rose is in the room, learns out of necessity to track Poe’s sharp eyed stare when he enters the cockpit, and maybe most importantly, learns that the Force is something intangible and terrifying to those who do not wield it. Quietly, Rey packs information away to study further when the rest of the crew has filed away into their makeshift bunks and the cockpit is empty save for her, Chewie, and the familiar clink of Han’s dice.

 

With each light cycle that passes, the _Millennium Falcon_ begins to feel less like home and more like hell. Rey finds herself spending more and more time operating during the quietest hours, when even the sublight engines seem to bring their hum down and there’s no one to witness her silent vigil save for the indifferent blue light of hyperspace. She’d never thought that she’d miss the isolation that came with Jakku’s sweeping orange sands, but the _Falcon_ is so crowded she can hardly breathe (and the one person whose company she craves is parsecs and parsecs away).

 

It’s Rose who finds her one lonely night in the pilot’s chair, synthetic caf in hand and brow creased as she watches the readouts in front of her pensively. The other woman doesn’t say anything, only tugs the zipper of her jumpsuit up a little higher before settling into the co-pilot’s chair with a soft exhalation. Rey studies her companion out of the corner of one hazel eye, content to let the silence stretch out between them for a little while longer as she leans back into the familiar leather.

 

It is, unsurprisingly, Rose who eventually speaks first.

 

“Finn says you’ve been quiet lately.”

 

One freckled shoulder rises and falls noncommittally, and Rey takes a sip of caf, unsure as to why she’s so surprised her friend had noticed the shift in her behavior.

 

“I just wanted to make sure you knew you’re not alone.”

 

Han’s dice clink with the sway of the ship, and Rey struggles to breathe past the memory of dark hair and liquid eyes ( _you’re not alone_ ). They settle back into silence, twin stares turned out to watch the stream of stars that flow over the transperisteel, and stay like that until the light cycle begins again in earnest. It quickly becomes routine, Rose seeking her out in the loneliest parts of the night, two cups of synthetic caf in hand to join in her vigil (the shorter girl never asks exactly _who_ they’re keeping vigil for, and Rey certainly doesn’t offer the knowledge).

 

She has a feeling Rose may already know, feels it in the way the other woman’s Force signature ripples at the edges whenever Rey’s being particularly reticent. But the technician doesn’t ask, and Rey’s entirely too fond of her company to tell her outright. So instead they dance around the subject, filling the cockpit with stories of old Star Destroyer technology and how it tended to go a little soft under the sun, and the way mine shafts would sing when the wind hit them just right.

 

Their friendship grows like one of the spiny, night blooming flowers indigenous to Jakku, sinking its roots deep into the pocked durasteel paneling of the _Falcon_ and thriving against all odds. A few weeks after Rose’s first appearance in the cockpit, Rey sits alone in the pilot’s chair, ankles crossed atop the dash and caf cradled against her chest as she studies the stars above them. Rose is late, and as much as Rey had come to treasure her solitude, she cannot deny the rush of relief that floods her stomach when the shorter woman knocks at the door.

 

“Sorry I’m late.” Her cheeks are flushed, and Rey notes a timbre to her Force signature that hadn’t ever been there before.

 

“Finn and I...” Rose trails off, cheeks going a shade of pink so deep Rey almost worries her friend is about to pass out. Finn and Rose as a unit weren’t a topic that had ever come up during their late night conversations; much like the subject of Rey’s vigil, she hadn’t asked and Rose hadn’t offered. Either way, Han’s dice clink almost knowingly, Rose flaps her hands uselessly, and somehow Rey still understands.

 

That night, after Rose says her breathless goodbye, Rey sits alone in the cockpit well into the next light cycle replaying the sensation of calloused fingers curling into her own again and again and again. She dreams of Ben nightly, of the way his eyes went soft at the edges when he looked at her, how his lips would feel pressed reverently against the pulse in her throat, images she tucks away against her sternum for the lonely hours between the end of one light cycle and the beginning of the next. It’s different though, this time, more tangible than ever before when his fingers come up to cradle her face. Rey thinks that _this_ must be what it feels like to be a rock on Ahch-to’s shore when his lips crash over hers like some great tidal event.

 

Four months into the Resistance’s odyssey Rey finds herself face to face with the very man she had spent the last sixteen weeks maybe-grieving for. It’s late in the light cycle, that magical hour where the ship becomes silent enough to miss even the characteristic absence of sound that heralds their bond springing to life. Synthetic caf hits the durasteel at her feet with a clatter when the cockpit door slides open and Rey registers the sight in front of her: Ben Solo stands framed in the hexagonal transperisteel paneling, wide eyed and nearly trembling. Rey keys the door shut behind her with suddenly clumsy fingers and steps over the spilt coffee wordlessly, closing the distance between them with all the finality of tides drawn by the moon.

 

“Rey.” His voice is just as soft as it had been in the throne room, maybe even softer still when he breathes her name into the air between them; and Rey’s never been a particularly religious girl but in that second, she suddenly understands why empires of old had gone to war for deities.  

 

“I dreamed about you.” The admission tumbles from Ben’s lips at the same time that her toes come to slot between his own like two halves of a coupled converter, an act that places her nose just a few scant inches from his sternum. Rey tilts her chin up, brow creased when she feels Ben’s mind brushing tentatively against her own.

 

“I dreamed about you too.” Rey reaches out towards Ben’s mind in the Force and shares dreams of salt water kisses and his hands like hurricanes against her skin. The _Falcon’s_ cockpit seems very small when Ben’s (bare) fingers cradle her chin, holding her steady as he dips his head down until he can speak against parted pink lips.

 

“Those are the same dreams I had.”

 

And then he is kissing her.

 

After that first, fully cognizant connection, the Force graciously snaps their realities over one another’s on an almost daily basis. It’s usually near the beginning of the light cycle for Rey, when she sits sprawled in the pilot’s chair, having just sent Rose back off to bed (or Finn’s bunk, she isn’t sure which, most nights). They must be on very opposite cycles, wherever Ben is, as he’s always getting ready for bed; meticulously shaving in a mirror she cannot see, chest bare and sleep pants slung low on his thin hips.

 

Rey tries not to stare (and always fails), earning cheeky grins that send her poor heart stuttering arrhythmically against her ribs. Sometimes he’s working on his lightsaber, or she on hers, and it’s with steady hands and a natural aptitude for teaching that Ben helps her to repair the damage they’d done to his Grandfather’s saber in the throne room.

 

“There’s nothing wrong with a cracked crystal.” Her maybe-lover muses one such night as they sit on her bunk, lightsaber components spread around them atop rumpled sheets. Rey laughs, presses a kiss against the tip of one pink ear, and continues to methodically clean her kyber’s casing so as to let Ben blush in privacy.

 

“You’ve seemed much more relaxed these last few weeks.” The statement hangs in filtered air like a retina burn when Rose announces it into the late light cycle silence. Rey inhales slowly, weighing her options under the pretense of studying the hyperdrive’s gearshift beneath Rose’s soft stare.

 

“Uh, yeah.” Rey finally offers unhelpfully, mouth drier than Niima outpost at high noon when she finally speaks. Rose raises both eyebrows and takes a sip of synth caf before pinning Rey with a blaster fire stare.

 

“It’s Kylo Ren, isn’t it?”

 

Rey swallows thickly, unable to meet her friend’s gaze when she nods.

 

“How did you know?” Warm fingers curl around her elbow, and it’s with horror that Rey realizes her eyes are wet when she brings them up to Rose’s open face. Her friend smiles wanly, pulls Rey into a hug the bridges their two seats and whispers into her hair,

 

“I’m not stupid, you look like you’re going to either throw up or pass out every time someone mentions him.” Rey manages to choke out a laugh, at that, and soon the cockpit is filled with their laugher.

 

“Plus,” Rose adds once they’ve calmed down a little bit, eyes going sober as she continues, “I’ve heard you talking seemingly to yourself late at night.” Rey nods, and makes a mental note to be better about communicating over the bond (though she’ll miss the feeling of his name in her mouth).

 

“You’ve gotta be careful though.” Rose says with all the gravity of a death knell when she rises from the co-pilot’s seat. “I’m not the only one who’s noticed.”

 

When she leaves, Rey stares out into deep space and learns the cold lick of fear up her spine.


	39. Chapter 39

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Leia can sense Reylo’s infant before either of them even know Rey’s pregnant. It comes as an absolute shock, but Leia is just the most supportive person
> 
> this is so fluffy, idk who i am, i need to go get back in touch with my ANGST.

Leia knows _ages_ before either her well meaning but fundamentally unprepared son or the woman who brought him home figure it out. It starts as less than a spark, a small shift in Rey’s force signature that thrums low and warm like the hum of sublight engines just before full ignition. She knows the feeling intimately, can remember the exact second it sprung to life within herself so many years ago, sending a young, shocked Leia skittering out of her bunk and into the _Falcon’s_ cockpit. The Princess turned General sips her tea and smiles privately at the reports in front of her, content to wait.

 

Spring turns to summer, and the garden world they’d hidden away on blooms in a way Leia hasn’t quite seen since Alderaan. She takes her tea on the landing pad, surrounded by dormant X-Wings and the soft ambient noise that comes with such a densely foliaged world. Ben and Rey move in the same patterns they had since his defection, sparring together in the mornings (an act that drew crowds without fail), taking their lunch between the ventral canons of Ben’s Silencer, and retiring to Rey’s bunk once the sun dipped beneath the horizon. Leia watches it all with a smile on her lips, content to wait for the two most powerful Force users in the Galaxy to recognize the little life between them.

 

According to Ben, it’s Rey who figures it out first, though he’s the one who bursts into her office at nearly midnight with wild eyes and hair like a thunderstorm around his face.

 

“Mom.” Leia raises one eyebrow and sets down her tea (holds her hand as close to her chest as ever).

 

“Yes, Ben?” Her son swallows thickly, runs a hand through hair that only tousles it further, and looks for all the world like he’s about to cry.

 

“Rey’s pregnant.” The would-be-last Skywalker looks at his mother imploringly, and it’s with a sip of her tea that Leia admits,

 

“I know dear.”

 

Rey begins to join Leia for tea in the afternoon, hair hanging loosely around her face as it dries in the gentle sun. Their conversation meanders comfortably, from Ben and his determination to be a father worth having, to the act of growing a human itself (something Rey admits she never gave herself the chance to consider in her own future). Ben joins them sometimes too, dusting kisses across the crown of Rey’s head and stealing sips of her tea when he thinks neither of them are looking.

 

When Rey and Ben marry under an awning of X-Wings and settling dusk, Leia doesn’t think she’s ever seen her son happier. He kisses his bride like she’s the air in his lungs, and Leia knows she isn’t imagining the blue almost figures that flicker at the edges of her vision when Rey of Jakku lets a rare tear slide down her cheek.

 

When the baby is born, Ben weeps freely, one calloused hand over his mouth as he watches Rey brush wispy black hair away from their child’s face. Leia wraps a hand of her own around his arm, and her son presses a damp kiss against her temple before rushing to join his wife on the cramped little medical bed. He doesn’t leave her side for days, sleeping with Rey settled in his arms and their child cushioned against one muscled arm (much to the chagrin of the med droids assigned to them). The Force is luminous around them, joyous to the point that even those who do not feel its call walk with lighter steps, the entire base vibrating with pleasure at the physical manifestation of its balance.

 

Leia sips her tea at the foot of Rey’s bed and watches her granddaughter (Padmé, named at Ben’s request for his own grandmother) nurse, tiny brow creased in concentration. Ben snores softly into Rey’s shoulder, one arm lazily slung over her hips and wholly unaware of his mother’s presence in the room. The two women share a smile, and Leia notes that for the first time in her life, she can feel peace in her bones.


	40. Chapter 40

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: reylo + nearly getting caught in the act (could be by leia, finn, hux, C3PO, etc....you decide)
> 
> *sips from casual sex friday mug*

Ben Solo is probably the most stubborn person Rey’s ever encountered (and that’s counting both of his parents). He pursues everything from repairs on the  _ Falcon  _ to plaiting his mother’s hair with a single minded kind of intensity that reminds Rey of sand so hot it burns and the smell of durasteel under Jakku’s sun. He pursues whatever task is at hand like a man with hell on his heels and now, in the half light of the  _ Falcon’s _ commons, that task is  _ her _ .

“B-” Rey inhales sharply through her nose and bites her lip to focus past the feeling of Ben’s mouth on her throat.

“ _ Ben. _ ” The former Supreme Leader continues, completely undeterred by her admittedly feeble protests. It’s late in the light cycle, so much so that Rey is almost sure there’s no chance of any of their passengers (namely, his mother) walking in on them, but the fear still lingers in the back of her head. For his part, Ben couldn’t seem to care less, a point he drives home by rolling his hips with a wicked grin.

“Relax sweetheart.” The hand at the nape of her neck tightens and Rey’s eyes flutter shut of their own accord.

“It’ll be fine.”

What Ben’s words lack in persuasiveness, his lips make up tenfold, blazing a trail of fire down to suck a lurid mark into the base of her throat with a wicked grin. Fingers calloused from years of lightsaber wielding set to work on removing her tunic, and by the time Ben’s got the first layer falling away from her shoulders, Rey can’t even remember why she was so worried in the first place. Ben’s hips roll again, erection prominent where it strains against the front of his pants, and Rey sets about rocking against it as he removes the rest of her upper layers.

_ Beautiful.  _ His voice is rough even over the bond, and Rey cannot help the shiver that runs down her spine when he presses a reverent kiss onto her sternum with a low  _ mine.  _ Ben wastes no time in sucking one pert nipple into his mouth, eyes burning like engines breaking atmo when they flick up to study her face in the barely-there light. Slowly, and with a wet sound that nearly stops Rey’s heart, Ben releases her nipple in favor of capturing her lips in a kiss so hot it makes Jakku look like Hoth. Her hips rock, setting a torturously slow pace that has Ben digging his fingers into her sides with each lazy roll.

“Stand up.” He orders when her pupils are blown wide, eyes more or less black between the lack of light and force of desire. Rey’s sure she’s never stood quite so quickly as she does then, fingers moving faster than the speed of light to shimmy her pants down. When she’s fully naked in the drafty room Rey brings her gaze up and promptly feels her mouth go drier than the Goazon badlands at the sight that greets her. Ben’s got his pants around his ankles and one large palm wrapped around the shaft of his cock, moving in sure strokes as he watches her.

“Well?” Rey licks her lips and files away the image for later. “You’re not just going to look, are you?”

She’s back on his lap almost before he’s finished speaking, and Ben gives an appreciative hiss when the head of his cock sinks just slightly into her heat. The Force sings around them so loudly that Rey’s sure even the Porgs can hear it when Ben guides her down to sheathe him fully, a bright kind of noise that mixes with the feeling of being  _ full  _ and sends her head into the crook of his neck. Ben presses kisses and praise into her hair as he starts moving, pulse hammering away beneath Rey’s lips.

They’re so caught up in one another that they  _ almost  _ miss the distinct sound of footsteps on durasteel paneling. All at once, Rey freezes, knuckles going white where her fingers curl into Ben’s shoulders as he stills beneath her.

“ _ Shit. _ ” Ben growls, and stands without preamble, arms flexing to support Rey’s weight as he dashes across to the cockpit. Over his shoulder, Rey watches as the almost-voyeur’s right foot clears the corner just as the door to the cockpit slides shut. Han’s dice clink in what can only be congratulations, Ben leans back against the wall, and neither of them can bring themselves to give a shit about the clothes left scattered across the commons floor.

“So sweetheart.” Ben’s hands slide down to squeeze her ass appreciatively. “Want to pick up where we left off?”

 


	41. Chapter 41

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i found this half finished drunk in my hotel room last night and did a lil bit of tweaking on my last flight. i hope everyone's having a great wednesday!

One of the first things Ben learns about Rey is that she loves water. Which, in hindsight, makes rather a lot of sense. Jakku wasn’t exactly a place with an abundance of moisture; where one could waste the precious liquid. It was a means of survival, not something to bathe in or smile into as it fell from the sky. Rey tells him all of this very matter of factly as they sit together between the ventral canons of his TIE Silencer, taking a quick break to hydrate before jumping back into their work on the engine. Her arms are slick with grease and sweat, muscles standing out in sharp relief as she picks at the cuticle of her right thumb.

“It’s strange now, to see people use it so freely.” Ben lets his eyes trail up to the soft curve of her cheek, still a dusky gold from the Jakku sun. “I’ve still never used anything other than a sonic fresher.”

Ben’s eyebrows rise at the admission, and he pulls his gaze away from where it’s wandered to her throat and the soft bruise blooming there from his mouth two nights ago.

“Never?” She mildly shakes her head, takes another swig from their bottle, and passes the water to him.

“Never.”

The former Supreme Leader sips, watches as Rey plucks a careful selection of wrenches from the tools spread out in front of them, and begins to plan.

He sets his finished scheme into motion a week and two days later, after a supply run to Bothawui. When compared to the fantastical hauls of his father’s legacy, Ben’s is meager: a plethora of soaps and two (ridiculously expensive) towels, a load small enough to hide in the standard issue flight pack he’d fled the  _ Supremacy  _ with. The offering doesn’t seem so small though when Rey’s eyes light up in Ben’s bunk that night, nimble fingers quick to examine each product as she sits cross legged atop the sheets.

“I don’t even know what half of these are!” The wonder is clear in her voice, and not for the first time Ben thinks that his heart might be about to stop for loving her.

“To be fair.” He settles onto the mattress beside her and tucks his nose against her neck, savoring the smell of her skin for a few seconds before continuing. “I don’t either.” Rey laughs, bright and warm in the half furnished room, and Ben dusts a few dry kisses into her throat.

“But I know a way we could figure it out.”

As a general rule of thumb, outdated technology bothered Ben more than just about anything (second maybe only to Hux when he had still been an inescapable fact of Ben’s life, and anyone who fought with sloppy footwork). In weaponry it could be the difference between life and death, on board a ship it stressed systems and set the Force buzzing anxiously in the tips of his fingers. The latter, in particular, had been a point of contention between Han and Ben prior to his assimilation into Luke’s academy. However, for his current purposes, the  _ Millennium Falcon’s  _ ancient ‘fresher was perfect.

If Ben had thought that Rey was beautiful covered in engine coolant and swearing into the space between sublight converters (which he had), then Rey sudsy and smiling up into the water pouring from the ceiling was so beyond beautiful Ben knew there were no words for it.

“I didn’t know this was still functional,” Rey breathes into his chest once she’s tried every soap he’d bought at least once. For his part, Ben only smiles and decides to keep quiet about the hours he’d spent coaxing the old engineering into cooperating. Instead, he uses a deft flex of the Force to summon one last bottle to his hand: a floral shampoo he’d remembered his mother using when he was little.

“I guess we got lucky.” And they  _ did _ , Ben knows that better than the dip of Rey’s collarbones (which he knows very well). Whether or not he was referring to the ‘fresher they currently stood in, or the fact that they were both alive and in a position where Ben  _ could  _ take an afternoon to work shampoo through Rey’s hair was neither here nor there. As if on cue, the desert girl in his arms let out a damp sigh into his chest; nearly boneless beneath his hands in her hair and the water above them.

“Ready for bed?” Rey’s nod was a sleepy one, though her kiss when Ben tipped her head back to rinse the soap from her hair was anything but.

 


	42. Chapter 42

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: prompt! post-TLJ Reylo + dream-sharing about alternate universes where they are together and things are perfect.

The first time it happens Rey thinks that it’s nothing more than one of her usual dreams of Jakku. The desert planet haunts her, more so than ever before after Crait. Most nights, when she lies back in the threadbare bunks that line the  _ Falcon’s  _ crew quarters it’s like she never left. In her dreams, the AT-AT is always the same: a little drafty, sandy in the corners where eddying gusts swirl in along with her at the end of the day. Her flowers still bloom, well trimmed and thriving among the collection of tools she’d worn down past the point of usefulness.

This time though, there are little incongruities that send her heart racing. A collection of blasters hung neatly against one wall, her staff in the corner (though much more weathered than it was now), neat rows of tally marks spilling over onto the wall beside them. It is still her home, undeniably so, but it feels like a home much more lived in then her AT-AT had been when she’d hurtled past atmo on the  _ Falcon _ . Rey doesn’t know how long she spends picking through the familiar abode; only that when the knock comes (alarmingly close to her head) she jumps higher than a startled Vulptex.

Rey’s halfway across the AT-AT in a quest to wrap her hands around the familiar weight of her staff when a painfully familiar voice ricochets off the durasteel like blasterfire and stops her dead in her tracks.

“Unkar Plutt sent me.” Rey thinks that this must be a nightmare, then.

“I’m here to talk about the light freighter you scavenged three standard months ago.”

By the time Rey’s yanking open the side hatch of her AT-AT, she can feel an anxious sweat across her chest, and just  _ knows  _ her hair has started to curl at the sides like it always did under Jakku’s sun.

“I don’t have a light fr-” The quip dies in her mouth the second Rey registers the sight across from her. Ben solo stands with one hand on his hip and the other on a blaster strapped to his thigh. Swallowing thickly, she tears her eyes away from his tight leather pants and tries (honest she does) to focus on his face only to falter again when a breeze kicks up, and the open neck of Ben’s white shirt flutters.

“You  _ don’t _ have a light freighter?” He drawls, and Rey struggles to think past the smirk on his lips.

“Then do tell what that is.” Scrambling fully out of the AT-AT, Rey whips around to follow the nod of his chin and wonders where her subconscious got it’s wicked streak.

“Well.” She inhales slowly, staring incredulously at the  _ Millennium Falcon  _ where it’s parked between two dunes just a few paces behind her home. “I guess it’s a light freighter.”

Rey wakes with a start. Wakes to the hum of sublight engines and a sense of loss so profound that it sends her nearly retching over the side of her bunk. Around her the Force wails like a haboob against durasteel, and Rey wonders if maybe she’s starting to lose her mind.

It happens the next night too, though this time there’s no sand beneath Rey’s fingernails when she slips into the dream state. Instead, there’s a deep navy silk pressed against her cheek, and the unmistakable feeling of lips against her throat. Even with her eyes closed Rey knows who it is she shares a bed with and so, when Ben Solo’s soft baritone breaks the silence, she only smiles in response.

“Madame Jedi.” The title sends Rey’s eyes snapping open, and the sight that greets her knocks the breath out of her lungs with all the force of an elbow to the gut.

Ben is spread out atop the sheets beside her, but he is Ben as she’s never seen him before: well rested, a little softer at the edges, and sporting the same golden earrings his mother wore. Rey sucks in a shaky breath of perfumed air only to push it back out of her mouth in a soft puff when Ben’s lips find the shell of her ear.

“We have to be at the Senate in an hour and a half.” His breath is hotter than Jakku’s sun had even been when it hits her skin, sending her toes curling into the expensive sheets in response. The soft sound of silk shifting fills her ears as Ben adjusts their positions so that his weight comes to fall in the cradle of her hips, and as if he’d hit the ignition switch of her lightsaber the air is suddenly  _ electric _ . Rey brings her hands up to thread though his hair (just as dark but only half as long as it had been in the throne room) and tugs him down to brush her lips against his own in a kiss as soft as the silk beneath them. Ben’s reaction is instant; a surge in the Force like the tallest wave to batter Ahch-to’s shore, and a groan as his hips snap up against hers.

“It only takes twenty minutes for me to get into my Senatorial robes.” He mumbles against her lips, pausing only to grind his erection into the stretch of skin between her thigh and hip with a trembling exhale. Rey grins up at him, studies the way his ears have flushed pink (with arousal or nerves she doesn’t know which), and licks her lower lip slowly before pulling him down for a searing kiss.

Rey hurdles into consciousness with the taste of Ben’s mouth on her tongue and the fabric of her standard issue underwear drenched. The  _ Falcon’s  _ sublight engines hum indifferently, and it’s with shaky fingers that Rey dips past her waistband (parsecs and parsecs away, a wild eyed Ben Solo does the same).

  
  



	43. Chapter 43

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Kylo cuts his hair for his new role as SL, Rey is shooketh. 
> 
> i uh loVED EVERY SECOND OF WRITING THIS LIL PIECE. my inbox is filled with incredible prompts right now, and though going is slow (bc the weather is finally nice and i'm having trouble staying indoors) i do promise i am making my way through them! *blows a million kisses*

It’s _shorter,_ Rey thinks to herself as she stares at Ben’s hair in the half fogged ‘fresher mirror. Not so short as to not be able to kiss the high points of his cheekbones, but enough that his ears peeked through where they hadn’t before. It’s striking, just how much the simple act of trimming his hair changes Ben’s face, sending the hollows under his cheekbones and the sharp edge of his stare into sharp relief. It’s not until the Supreme Leader clears his throat, ears practically flaming, that Rey realizes not only is she staring, but there’s little more than a half-soaked towel between her and Ben in the too small ‘fresher.

 

“It uh, looks good.” She tries to say, only to wrinkle her nose when the statement comes out in an voice so breathy it couldn’t possibly be hers. Ben raises both eyebrows (an act that, just a few days ago would have sent them vanishing into his hair) and doesn’t speak, clearly waiting for her to continue.

 

“Your hair, I mean.” Rey’s got a tenuous at best grasp of what the Force can and cannot do, but right about now she could really benefit from using it to melt into the durasteel beneath her.

 

Ben’s cheeks flush to try and match his ears as he ducks his head, an anxious hand (bare, and pale in the cool light of the ‘fresher) running through wild curls. Their bond sings, drawn as tight as one of the drums hung out for sale in the tented marketplace within Niima Outpost. Rey swallows, the hand clutching her towel tightening as Ben flicks his stare up to follow a bead of water down the line of her jaw.

 

She wants to touch it too, to card her fingers through his hair and test the pliancy of the curls that seem to have found new freedom at this shorter length. The ‘fresher she’d considered irritatingly small up until approximately three minutes ago suddenly feels bigger than any sun, and the gap between her and Ben seems almost to grow as they make eye contact.

 

“Thanks.” Ben licks his lips, drops his gaze to the hollow between her collarbones where the same drop of water has drawn to a halt, and takes one step forward. Unable to resist the magnetic pull in her wrists Rey mirrors the movement and soon they’re standing so close that each breath pushes the tooth of her towel against the dark fabric of Ben’s tunic. It’s clear what comes next, written on Rey’s lips and the way Ben’s hands have moved up as if to curl around the dip of her waist. But before Ben can dip his head or Rey can roll up onto damp toes, the Force goes taught, and suddenly Rey is alone.


	44. Chapter 44

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for the prompt: Somewhere down the line, Rey and Kylo's subtle just-in-passing-but-I-love-you thing is hut-style hand touches. Like if they pass in the hallways and they're busy? A brief hand touch.

It starts, Rey figures one lonely night in her assigned bunk as she counts the seconds in between Rose’s breaths, on Ahch-to. Like most of the newer elements of her life, their little tradition had sprung into being among the craggy seaside cliffs and ardently green moors of the ocean-planet. That first night in her hut, firelit and incandescent when she revisits it in dreams or times of duress was the beginning of something as tangible as the rain that had lashed her cheeks in the aftermath.

At first it had remained only a figment of their fleeting and unpredictable bonds. A hesitant (and almost reverent) brushing of fingers that sent Rey’s heart hammering away in her ears and Ben’s cheeks flushing a shade of pink at odds with the sharp angles of his face.  _ He’s beautiful _ , Rey catches herself thinking as his fingertips memorize the topography of lightsaber calluses on her palm. Beautiful turns into brilliant, and brilliant turns into  _ mine _ one morning on Hoth so cold that each breath dusts Rey’s eyelashes white.

“Hoth doesn’t suit you,” the Supreme Leader smiles as Rey shivers against his chest, cursing every parsec between them when his arm around her waist affords no extra warmth. The outdated cold weather gear they’d found deep within the old Rebel base was flimsy at best, made for temporary use out of thin, crinkling material that shone in the dim lighting. It helped marginally when one was in the base itself, but was no match for the winds that howled across the tundra, more lethal than any sand storm Rey had ever weathered.

Ben smiles, unaffected by the next gust that wails through the open hangar doors, and curls his fingers into Rey’s.  _ Stay warm, Sweetheart  _ he rumbles through the bond; and in the next second Rey is alone save for the X-Wings and what frost glitters indifferently down from atop their wings and fuselages.

The frequency with which their realities snap into place over one another increases as the Resistance leaves Hoth’s sharp air and starry skies for hyperspace. Ben begins to look less gaunt, his eyes no longer shadowed with in same kind of casket stare she’d come to associate so heavily with him. He smiles more too, or at least what small upturning of lips seems to count as a smile to Ben Solo. Rey comments as such one night while they sit together in the  _ Falcon’s  _ cockpit, Ben crammed into the co-pilot’s seat and bathed in the flickering blue light of hyperspace.

“You seem happier,” her voice comes out as little more than a whisper, falling softly against the outdated technology that blinks benignly around them. Ben reacts like she’d all but shouted the statement though, inhaling sharply and turning to face her with a flush on his cheeks and ears so pronounced that it managed to read even washed out by the ambient light.

“Rey.” She wonders if his eyes have always burned like priming blasters, and when the Supreme Leader tenuously reaches his hand out across the distance between them Rey can’t stop the blush that rises to her own cheeks as she meets him halfway.

They meet in battle under the flat red light of Dathomir’s central star, the sound of their clashing lightsabers nearly lost to the scream of TIE-Fighters above them. Ben doesn’t wear his mask, and his eyes are plaintive and suspiciously wet as he parries each of Rey’s blows, the snap of his cracked crystal as unstable as their attempt at combat. Rey thinks that this must be some kind of twisted nightmare, feels the bile in her throat as she glances a blow off the crossguard of his saber, and spins out from under from the overhead slice he aims at her shoulder in response.  _ This isn’t right  _ every fibril of her musculature screams, and she must have projected that feeling across the bond because Ben’s face crumples as he steps in with his next attack, and his voice sounds more broken than any skeletal ship lost to Jakkuu’s sands when he returns,  _ I feel it too. _

Rey steps to his side in a halfhearted attempt to drive the hilt of her saber into his solar plexus, but instead ends up reaching her nondominant hand out towards him, and without a second of hesitation Ben does the same. Around them, the battle carries on as furiously as it had before, completely indifferent to the two most powerful Force users in the galaxy and the press of their fingers. 

Ben defects from the First Order seven light cycles after the altercation on Dathomir. Rey feels it the second he solidifies his resolve, a tremor in the Force that shakes every bone in her body. White knuckled and unthinking from the Pilot’s chair of the  _ Falcon,  _ she reaches out across the parsecs between them and sends the coordinates of their next location (a persistently rainy swamp world who’s name she’d long forgotten, but whose muggy heat she’s not looking forward to). Ben doesn’t respond, but just as she knows the melting point of old Empire durasteel, and how best to make use of Steelpeckers claimed by the sand, Rey knows he will come.

And he does, wailing past atmo in a battered TIE-Fighter that Rey just barely keeps their anti-airstrike cannons from shooting down. The landing is rough, and when Ben emerges from the steaming ship he doesn’t look much better, bruised and nursing a blaster hit to the thigh that has Rey’s throat going tight. There’s a moment of silence, broken only by the omnipresent drone of the planet’s fauna and the metallic sounds of Ben’s TIE unit settling.

 

Heedless of the crowd gathering beneath the canopy of X-Wings, or the blaster sights she can see focusing on Ben’s chest, Rey closes the distance between them in a few hurried strides and wastes no time in curling her fingers into Ben’s. The former Supreme Leader bows his head to exhale shakily against her ear, the blaster’s lower with one command from General Organa, and Rey wonders if this is what love is  _ supposed  _ to feel like when Ben bumps his nose against her temple and pulls their clasped hands closer against his body.

“Thanks for the coordinates, Sweetheart.”

 

Rey counts the seconds between his heartbeats, elevated but steady as he leans against her, and cannot help but think of that first, firelit clasp of their fingers so long ago. Rain begins to fall, pinging lightly against the dormant X-Wings, and hissing when it evaporated against the hull of Ben’s TIE unit. Leia is talking quickly, orders flowing from her mouth with practiced ease, and as the wary Resistance members file away Rey knows she should be paying attention; should understand just how her General had diffused such a potentially volatile situation. But everything is eclipsed by the brush of Ben’s lips against her cheek, and the way his fingers tremble against her own when Leia turns to face the two of them in the escalating rain.

 

“Seems we’ve a bit to talk about.”


	45. Chapter 45

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for the (really fucking fun) prompt: Rey and Kylo had a huge argument in a previous forcebond. When the force connects them again, Rey is in the shower. She turns the water off and puts her hands on her hips and starts arguing with him again and has zero shame that she is completely naked.
> 
> the title of this google doc was _ben vc: help, i've fallen and i can't get up_
> 
> (he's trying his best)

Rey isn’t really sure when the whole thing goes so sideways. One moment, she and Ben are sitting across from one another on the mussed sheets of her bed, bumping heads as he shows her the best way to maintenance the casing for her kyber crystal. And the next he’s tugging his gloves back on with a force that sends her poor heart lurching, eyes ablaze as they engage in a shouting match Rey’s sure somehow shakes the durasteel walls around them (that’s how it always is with them though, when it comes to passion).

When he leaves, winking out of existence like a star burned too bright, it’s like he takes every molecule of oxygen in the room with him. Rey throws herself back onto the bed, tries not to focus on how the smell of his skin still wreathes in her nose almost tauntingly, and cries. Parsecs and parsecs away, in the long shadows and indifferent black paneling of his chambers, Ben ( _ no, Kylo Ren _ ) bites the inside of his lip until it starts to bleed, and tries to convince himself that  _ no  _ he does  _ not  _ feel bad for ruining what had been a startlingly domestic moment.

The Force doesn’t connect them for almost two weeks afterwards, and in that time, Rey sharpens her anger to a point sharper than any fragmented piece of Star Destroyer. She holds the feeling close to her heart, using it to keep warm when the chill of hyperspace sets in too deep against her bones, and her treacherous mind starts to wander to the feeling of strong arms around her. Ben, for his part, wakes up every night with the taste of Rey’s skin on his lips and the distinct feeling that he’s lost something very dear (on the twelfth day, he stops sleeping entirely).

The second the bond springs to life, taught and hotter than high noon in the Goazon badlands, Rey feels the adrenaline begin to pump through her body. Barely even taking a second to drop her hands from where they’d been working conditioner through her hair, she takes a breath and reaches for the knife edge in her chest. With the shard of anger pulsing hotly from somewhere behind her sternum, Rey bares her teeth in a snarl and whips around to face the man who’d plagued her thoughts for the last half a lunar cycle.

“You absolute nerf herder!” Rey begins, one hand on her hip and other pushing a stubborn strand of waterlogged hair out of her face. “I can’t  _ believe _ you had to pick a fucking fight and then just  _ leave _ .” Both hands now on her hips, the scavenger turned pseudo Jedi takes a step forward, bare feet loud on the slick paneling beneath her. Ben, for his part, looks utterly cowed, eyes wide and cheeks steadily flushing pink as she advances on him.

“We were having a  _ nice time  _ and you had to go and  _ fucking ruin  _ it because of your  _ hard fucking head. _ ” The Supreme Leader raises bare palms up in a gesture of defeat, eyes locked firmly somewhere over Rey’s shoulder, an act that does absolutely nothing to diffuse the situation. With a flick of one sudsy hand and a snarl entirely more befitting to the battlefield, Rey shuts the water off and takes a step out of the ‘fresher to stand toe to toe with the black clad man. Ben swallows thickly, wills his heart rate to slow down, and does everything in his power to avoid staring at the expanse of bronzed skin before him (it doesn’t go well).

“Rey.” He breathes, only to be met with a damp finger against his chest and an indignant huff from the desert girl.

“Don’t you fucking  _ Rey _ me.” She responds, brow creased and cheeks pink as she rages.

“ _ Rey _ .” He tries again anyways, and when her eyes only flare brighter ( _ like the after burn of sublight engines breaking atmo _ , Ben thinks dumbly after the fact) the Supreme Leader does the only thing he can think to, and dips his head to kiss her.

There’s a beat where Rey’s eyes go wide, and Ben thinks that maybe he’s sorely miscalculated and that _this is it_ she’s finally going to kill him; but instead Rey’s Force signature sings, and he feels the anger melt away like knife edged ice crystals in the sun. Damp hands come up to thread into the wild curls at the nape of his neck, and Ben cannot help the sigh that drops his shoulders in response.

“You’re a fucking idiot.” Rey smiles up at him, pink cheeked and damn near glowing against the weave of his tunic. Nodding his head in agreement, Ben presses a kiss against her nose, and lets a litany of apologies flow across the bond ( _ I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let my temper get away from me, I’ll do better next time) _ . 

It’s not until the suds in her hair have all but dissipated and Rey rolls up onto her toes to shower kisses across his jaw that Ben suddenly remembers she’s completely naked.

 


	46. Chapter 46

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this got so out of hand so quickly. when i woke up this morning i did NOT think i was going to be writing ben the soft boy gardener but HERE I AM ANYWAYS FOLKS.
> 
> prompt: hey zoey what if you did a gardening piece with some language of flowers tied it

When Rey thinks of the places she’s come to call home, Varykino draws so stark a contrast from the rest of the list ( _ an AT-AT in the sand, her mossy hut on Ahch-to, the  _ Falcon  _ and a bunk she’d later learn to have been Ben’s _ ) that it feels almost like a dream when she wakes each morning in its airy marble halls. For the first week, she and Ben do little more than explore one another (Rey finds hat sex is wholly different and entirely better without the omnipresent pressure of war above their heads), eat the fresh fruit the caretakers pile upon the dining room table each morning, and swim in the shallow waters that glitter up at them from the balcony.

By the second week though, when Rey finally gets the hang of swimming and no longer clings to Ben’s biceps like a Nexu in water, they move onto other activities. She finds him on his knees in the soft earth beneath the balcony one golden summer morning, dark shirt open and collarbones bright with a thin sheen of sweat as he worked. Rey sits beside him and watches in fascination as he carefully tills the earth, meticulously setting in beds of deep brown soil that wreath in her nose like hope when Rey inhales.

“The archives had an impressive amount of information on horticulture.” He mentions in response to Rey’s unasked question that afternoon as they lay a few feet down the sweeping lawn from his handiwork, equidistant between soon to be flowerbeds and the steady lap of lake water against the shore. Rey smiles up at the sky, eyes closed and the image of a young Ben Solo studying books on the nuances of horticulture swimming behind her lids. When she opens her eyes it is to the shadow cast by Ben looming over her, dirty hands on either side of her face as he gently rests his weight in the cradle of her hips. Rey barely has time to smile before he’s dipping his head, the scent of sweat and sun heady in her nose as he sets about kissing her with all the hunger of a starved man at a feast.

Leia sweeps into the estate a few weeks later, a soft smile on her lips, and a carefully wrapped package in one bejeweled hand that she passes to Ben before pulling him down to press a kiss against his cheek. Rey leans against the marble balustrade and watches with fond eyes at the familial gesture only to be pulled into an equally fierce embrace the second Leia pulls away from her son.

“You look lovely, dear.” Her mother in law sighs, the braids in her hair a dead language that shine in the afternoon sun.

The morning after Leia’s departure, Rey wakes to an empty bed and a gentle brush of Ben’s Force signature from the garden. When she steps out onto the grass, barefoot and wearing only one of Ben’s longer tunics his answering smile is bright, almost blinding beneath the early summer sun. Leia’s package is spread out on the grass beside him, and it isn’t until Rey’s kneeling beside him that she can make out the contents.

“Seeds?” She asks even as Ben brushes kisses across the line of one collarbone where it peeks out past the neckline of his tunic.

“Mmmhm.” He muffles against her skin, one soil covered hand coming up to curl around her hip, heedless of the earth smeared across bronzed skin in the process. Rey sighs softly and threads her hands through the thick curls at the base of Ben’s skull as he lays her out alongside the flowerbed and proceeds to push the fabric of his tunic up and over her head, leaving paths of soil and goosebumps in his wake across her skin. Rey’s eyes slide closed in the same second that Ben closes his mouth over one rosy nipple, and then all she can focus on is the feeling of his lips, and the sound of the lake lapping at the shore.

When they’re finished, laying tangled and sated with the lazy summer breeze slowly cooling the sweat on their skin, Ben presses a kiss against the crown of Rey’s head and rolls them so that he can tug the little parcel of precious seeds closer. Rey observes between long blinks as Ben points out each individual seed, voice falling softly against her ear as he details their unique traits and, finally, their planet of origin.

“Alderaan.” He says, rising up onto one elbow and pressing one final kiss against Rey’s shoulder before helping her to wriggle back into his tunic.

“But the planet has been gone for years?” Rey murmurs as she rubs her thighs together, mouth a little dry at the sight of Ben’s low slung trousers and bare chest as he turns back to face the empty plots. He grins, and lifts one delicate little seed up between two fingers to examine it in the sun.

“Seed stores off planet.” His smile is brilliant as he carefully digs a hole just big enough for the seed, large fingers incredibly delicate as he covers it like some great treasure.

“Mother pulled a few strings to gain access to them for us.” They spend the rest of the afternoon planting seeds and lounging in the sun (Rey never quite manages to get pants on, much to Ben’s joy).

Their flowers bloom on a rainy midsummer day among still air and a hush broken only by the sounds of rain of the roof and surface of the lake. Rey follows Ben out into the garden, transfixed by the sight of heavy clouds wreathing around the tops of the mountains that sweep behind the estate, and relishing every drop of water onto her skin. The former Supreme Leader ducks to gently pluck a sprig of flowers with feathery orange petals from the dirt, and joins Rey under the rainfall to hand it to her.

“Alderaanian Orange Blossom.” He begins, snaking an arm around her waist to tug her closer against his chest.

“Native to the region my Mother grew up in.” Rey brings the spray of flowers up to her nose and inhales slowly, the scent one she’d caught on Leia’s clothes many a time before.

“On Alderaan, it was customary to communicate through flowers.” Ben continues, voice thick with emotion as he looks out over the lake, chin resting atop her head. Content to wait, Rey presses her lips against his throat and curls a little closer, counts the drops that land on her cheeks as the silence draws out.

“Orange Blossom customarily meant eternal love,” his voice was barely more than a whisper now, breath hitching in his throat as Rey brought her hand up to cradle the base of his skull. “Marriage and fruitfulness.”

Ben lifts his head just enough to blink down at her, and before Rey can even begin to string together the words necessary to communicate the way her chest felt like it might burst, he was kissing her.

 


End file.
